I’m so glad this sub exists because I’ve been annoying everyone in my life with my theories about these two … I figured this would be the right place to post my speculation/lyric breakdowns of songs that they may have written about each other, split into different posts for albums for ease of reading.
Starting with Reputation (2017) – I imagine the failed relationship with Matty was still fresh for Taylor during the writing/recording of this album. Her reference to her “longings locked in lowercase inside a vault” definitely made me look back at Rep in a way I hadn’t before (and I do think we’ll see some Matty-coded vault tracks on TV”. That said I don’t want to erase her other relationships, especially with Joe, so I’ll make notes of where I think I’m either stretching for a Matty connection or I think there are multiple muses.
Special mention to “Getaway Car” which feels like another (fictionalized?) response to Robbers but the story she tells is very similar to her fling with Tom, especially given the third man in the song. I usually claim it for the maylors anyway bc who cares about Tom. Let me know what you think.
“...Ready For It?”
Knew he was a killer first time that I saw him / Wonder how many girls he had loved and left haunted / But if he's a ghost, then I can be a phantom
I can't ignore the connections here to two other songs thought to be written about M - Ghost (2014) and Haunted (2015) by Halsey (I won't bother going into the HalseyMatty lore here but I could in another post...)
"You're a Rolling Stone boy, never-sleep-alone boy / Got a million numbers and they're filling up your phone, boy" (Ghost) "I'm begging you to keep on haunting me" (Haunted) "My ghost / Where'd you go? / I can't find you in the body sleeping next to me" (Ghost)
I can be a phantom holdin' him for ransom / Knew I was a robber first time that he saw me / Stealing hearts and running off and never saying sorry / But if I'm a thief, then he can join the heist / And he can be my jailer
Robbers is one of The 1975’s most famous songs. In the music video two lovers stick up a convenience store - definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it. In 2014 M dedicated the song to T in Dallas in November 2017 (a week after she attended the concert in LA) here and here
Burton to this Taylor
One of my favorite references that I think reveals a lot about the messy but irresistible relationship M and T seem to have. Here's a link to a great article about the wild love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Every love I've known in comparison is a failure / I forget their names now, I'm so very tame now / Never be the same now
This sentiment is repeated throughout many of the songs I believe are about M. The idea of a life altering love is obviously prevalent across TTPD but also in folklore, evermore, and Midnights. ex. "I'm never gonna love again" (cowboy like me), "I don't remember who I was before you painted all my nights a color I have searched for since" (Question...?), "I felt aglow like this / Never before and never since" (loml)
Also want to mention This Must Be My Dream from 2016, which M has said is about an older gf but may fit: "Let me tell you 'bout this girl / I thought she'd rearrange my world"
No one has to know / In the middle of the night, in my dreams / You should see the things we do, baby
See Guilty as Sin? lol
Baby, let the games begin
Taylor in an interview with Glamour in February 2014:
TS: [Nods. Pauses.] I think everyone should approach relationships from the perspective of playing it straight and giving someone the benefit of the doubt. Until he establishes that this is a game. And if it's a game, you need to win. The best thing to do is just walk away from the table.
CL: Is that winning?
TS: It is when they come back. [Laughs.] And if they don't, then they didn't care enough to begin with.
conclusion: I believe ...Ready For It? is a response to Robbers and reveals M and T's similar romanticism (sometimes toxic but so addicting). The mirrored stylization of ...Ready For It? and Question...? makes me think the latter is a continuation of the former. The mentions of “island breeze” and “we’ll move to an island” have made people believe this song is about Tom Hiddleston but other lyrics, namely “younger than my exes” pretty clearly contradicts that.
"End Game"
I wanna be your end game / I wanna be your first string /I wanna be your A-Team
Funny reading this after The Alchemy and So High School.
Big reputation, big reputation / Ooh, you and me, we got big reputations / And you heard about me / Ooh, you and me would be a big conversation
And they were! Especially because T hadn't been really linked to anyone after Harry, the speculation about her and M came hard and fast. M especially was inundated with questions in the months after the LA and NYC shows.
And I heard about you / You like the bad ones, too
Another possible reference to a Halsey song, this time Hurricane from 2014: "He says, "Oh, baby, beggin' you to save me / Well, lately I like 'em crazy/ Oh, maybe, you could devastate me"
I don't wanna touch you, I don't wanna be / Just another ex-love you don't wanna see / I don't wanna miss you / Like the other girls do
Very reminiscent of The 1975's song Somebody Else, released in 2016, speculated to be about T: "I don't want your body / But I hate to think about you with somebody else"
I hit you like bang, we tried to forget it, but we just couldn't
"Flashbacks waking me up / I get drunk, but it's not enough" (Death By A Thousand Cuts)
And I bury hatchets, but I keep maps of where I put 'em
"I circled you on a map / I haven't come around in so long" (The Alchemy)
Reputation precedes me, they told you I'm crazy
"And they tried to warn you about me" (The Albatross)
And I can't let you go, your hand prints on my soul
"Marked me like a bloodstain" (Cardigan)
It's like your eyes are liquor, it's like your body is gold
So many of the songs speculated to be about M reference his eyes but the most relevant (not the starry eyed motif which we'll get to in the future) are: "Eyes like sinking ships on waters / So inviting I almost jump in" (gold rush) and "But your eyes are flying saucers from another planet / Now I'm all for you like Janet" (Snow On The Beach)
"Deep blue, but you painted me golden" (Dancing With Our Hands Tied)
You've been calling my bluff on all my usual tricks / So here's the truth from my red lips
From the same Glamour article, Taylor talking about her 'trick' when dating:
CL: What's the freeze-out?
TS: You don't respond to any of his texts or calls until he does something desperate [like] shows up. Or he calls and leaves a voice mail. Something that makes it very clear to you that he's interested.
disclaimer: I am someone who thinks the Tom relationship was not that serious for T, so this song imo fits what she may have told us about her relationship with M more, though the beach reference does point to Tom in a way.
"Don't Blame Me"
I've been breaking hearts a long time / And toying with them older guys / Just playthings for me to use
See the quotes from the Glamour article above. "Younger than my exes, but he act like such a man, so" (...Ready For It?)
Something happened for the first time / In the darkest little paradise
May refer to the dark concert venue where they met for the first time (see So It Goes... for more)
For you / I would cross the line / I would waste my time / I would lose my mind / They say, "She's gone too far this time."
Sentiment that is repeated throughout TTPD, but most clearly in But Daddy I Love Him
My name is whatever you decide / And I'm just gonna call you mine
Though this could be a stretch, in the spotify storyline for The 1975's Oh Caroline (2022), speculated to be about T, M said "It's an invented character, where the cadence really mattered. It couldn't be "Oh Linda" or "Oh Jane" [or "Oh Taylor"] - you had to have a 3 syllable that really works. I knew what the song was about, I had felt that about someone before and I got to write an episodic, mini movie about the subject"
disclaimer: If about M, this song is very on the nose with the drug references. Generally it's a very vague song and could easily be about Joe or another ex.
"So It Goes..."
See you in the dark / All eyes on you, my magician / All eyes on us / You make everyone disappear
Likely refers to the first time T saw M in person, when she was front row at The 1975's LA show. All eyes were on M then (including T's)
"Once upon a time, the planets and the fates / And all the stars aligned / You and I ended up in the same room / At the same time" (Mastermind)
Tripping, tripping when you're gone
May relate to Don't Blame Me: "Trip of my life / every time you're touching me"
'Cause we breakdown a little / But when you get me alone, it's so simple
Maybe a stretch but M famously had a breakdown on stage in Boston on December 6, 2014. In an interview with the Guardian he said: “There was girl stuff. There was family stuff. There was financial stuff. There was drug stuff. I remember hearing the crowd and having an identity crisis. I thought: ‘If you want to see a show, I’ll give you a fucking show. If you’ve come to see the jester drink himself into a slumber, I’ll give it to you.’ I felt like I’d become an idea as opposed to being a person.”
“And I was 25 and afraid to go outside” (Give Yourself a Try)
And all the pieces fall / Right into place
"I laid the groundwork and then, just like clockwork / The dominoes cascaded in a line" (Mastermind)
Getting caught up in a moment / Lipstick on your face
"I said, "Don't fall in love with the moment" / She said I've got a lot to learn / Don't fall in love with the moment /And think you're in love with the girl" (She's American)
Come here, dressed in black now
"Yeah, we're dressed in black from head to toe" (Chocolate). Taylor was also wearing all black the night of the LA show.
conclusion: You did a number on me / But, honestly, baby, who's counting? / I did a number on you / But, honestly, baby, who's counting? ( "King of My Heart"
We met a few weeks ago / Now you try on callin' me "baby" like tryin' on clothes
The reason why I don't necessarily think Joe fits. They met at the Met Gala in 2017 and she very quickly started seeing Tom, obviously it could still be him but I wanted to note this.
"Don't call me 'kid,' don't call me 'baby' / Look at this idiotic fool that you made me" (illicit affairs)
And you move to me like I'm a Motown beat
M loves Motown, even sampling a track by The Temptations on Tonight (I Wish I Was Your Boy). He's also always loved dancing, which you can see in the videos for A Change of Heart and Oh Caroline.
Salute to me I'm your American Queen / Say you fancy me, not fancy stuff
He's English, obviously.
And we rule the kingdom inside my room / With all these nights we're spending / Up on the roof with a school girl crush
Totally speculation but M and T hiding out in her NYC home makes a lot of sense from other pieces she has shared about the relationship “My kingdom come undone” (Hoax)
Late in the night, the city's asleep / Your love is a secret I'm hoping, dreaming, dying to keep
Speculation again but fits with the story of M and T as mostly loving each other in secret (see Dancing With Our Hands Tied and Dress)
Is this the end of all the endings? / My broken bones are mending
As mentioned above, T had seemingly taken a break from dating after the breakup with Harry.
disclaimer: Definitely not 100% sure on this one as there is convincing evidence that it is about J
"Dancing With Our Hands Tied"
I, I loved you in secret / First sight, yeah, we love without reason / Oh, 25 years old
M and T were both born in 1989, M was 25 when they first met and dated and T was turning 25.
My, my love had been frozen / People started talking, putting us through our paces / I knew there was no one in the world who could take it / I loved you in spite of / Deep fears that the world would divide us
“A red rose grew up out of ice frozen ground / With no one around to tweet it” (The Lakes)
In an interview with the Guardian Matty said: “The day after she’d been to a show of ours, someone sent me a screenshot of E! News with the headline ‘Who is Matt Healy?’ That freaked me out. I’m not ready to indulge in that world and I’m not ready to be judged by that world.” So sad to read knowing that they dealt with a similar situation nearly a decade later.
Picture of your face in an invisible locket
“Wear you like a necklace” (So It Goes…)
And darling, you had turned my bed into a sacred oasis
“Now you hang from my lips / Like the Gardens of Babylon / With your boots beneath my bed” (cowboy like me)
I'd kiss you as the lights went out / Swaying as the room burned down / I'd hold you as the water rushes in / If I could dance with you again
Reminds me so much of the music video for cardigan, where T slips into a rough ocean and hangs on to a piano. Also from cardigan: “Leaving like a father / Running like water”
“Dress”
Our secret moments in a crowded room / They got no idea about me and you
"Did you ever have someone kiss you in a crowded room / And every single one of your friends was / Making fun of you" (Question...?)
There is an indentation in the shape of you / Made your mark on me, a golden tattoo
M seemingly makes a lasting impression: “Deep blue, but you painted me golden” (Dancing With Our Hands Tied) “The mark they saw on my collarbone” (Maroon) “Marked me like a bloodstain” (cardigan)
'Cause I don't want you like a best friend
T often seems to refer to a friendship with M, perhaps they tried it a few times: “We were supposed to be just friends” (Glitch) “Like you were my closest friend” (Maroon) “Just say when, I'd play again / He was my best friend / Down at the sandlot” (My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys)
And if I get burned, at least we were electrified
“I'd kiss you as the lights went out / Swaying as the room burned down” (Dancing With Our Hands Tied)
I'm spilling wine in the bathtub / You kiss my face and we're both drunk
Many of the possible M songs refer to M and T’s love of wine. “And I can see us twisted in bedsheets / August slipped away like a bottle of wine” (august) “The burgundy on my T-shirt when you splashed your wine into me / And how the blood rushed into my cheeks, so scarlet, it was (maroon)” (Maroon)
disclaimer - Obviously most likely about Joe given the reference to the 2017 Met Gala but I think it was worth a mention!
“Call It What You Want”
My baby's fly like a jet stream / High above the whole scene
Probably a double-entendre. M considers himself slightly on the outside of the ‘scene’ but this can come across as self assurance. This also could refer to literally being high on drugs
Loves me like I'm brand new
After T’s clever use of The Starting Line in TTPD I’m convinced she’s referring to the band Brand New. M posted a Brand New album on his ig story in 2020.
All my flowers grew back as thorns
An interesting contrast to “I once was poison ivy, but now I'm your daisy” from Don’t Blame Me
Windows boarded up after the storm
“I look through the windows of this love / Even though we boarded them up” (Death By A Thousand Cuts)
I'm laughing with my lover
“Laughing with my feet in your lap” (Maroon) “Please don't ever become a stranger / Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere” (New Year’s Day)
Making forts under covers
Matty famously built a fort in ATPOAIM 3. “I'll build you a fort on some planet / Where they can all understand it” (Down Bad)
Trust him like a brother
“Like I lost my twin” (Down Bad)
Starry eyes sparking up my darkest night
So many starry eyed references which is terribly romantic and terribly sad. “Do I really have to chart the constellations in his eyes?” (High Infidelity), “Your opal eyes are all I wish to see” (ivy), “Eyes full of stars” (cowboy like me), and “Gazing at me starry-eyed” (The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived)
I want to wear his initial on a chain 'round my neck
“Picture of your face in an invisible locket” (Dancing With Our Hands Tied) “Wear you like a necklace” (So It Goes…)
I recall late November, holding my breath
Late November fits perfectly into the timeline of M and T’s 2014 relationship. Late October to Late DecembeEarly January makes the most sense.
Slowly I said, "You don't need to save me / But would you run away with me?"
“You're mad thinking you could ever save me. Not looking like that.” (A Change of Heart)
disclaimer: Again lots of Joe references in this as well so take this with a grain of salt.
“New Year’s Day”
You and me from the night before, but / Don't read the last page
From Me and You Together Song (2020): “I think the story needs more pages, yes.” The reference to “the last page” also makes this song feel like more of a reminiscence than a song about a current lover.
I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day
Impossible not to reread these lyrics after Midnights was released as a nod to M: “When the morning came we / Were cleaning incense off your / Vinyl shelf ‘cause we lost track of time again” (Maroon)
You squeeze my hand three times in the back of the taxi / I can tell that it's gonna be a long road / I'll be there if you're the toast of the town, babe / Or if you strike out and you're crawling home
Especially after the release of TTPD it seems that both T and M made many promises to each other that they couldn’t keep
Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you / Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you / Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you / And I will hold on to you
The reference to memories here creates a bit of a confusing feeling about the muse for this song. Although T seems to be talking in the present tense I do think these are memories and dreams for a past relationship.
“Hold on and hope that we'll find our way back in the end / Do you think I have forgotten? / Do you think I have forgotten? / Do you think I have forgotten / About you?” (About You)
Please don't ever become a stranger / Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere / Please don't ever become a stranger / Whose laugh I could recognize anywhere
Not much to say about this but ow!
You and me forevermore
Again reminds me of Me and You Together Song (which I do buy as a song at least partially about T). And of course links to Evermore.
disclaimer: This could absolutely be about Joe but it does feel almost like a goodbye to M, closing the album. It’s as if she is reading “the last page”
Congrats if you read this lol. I clearly have too much time on my hands

Purely an opinion/theory post, no facts backing any thing, just shooting ideas out there.
Just looking at his profile, and the connection to this movie poster that states: “2024: The Year of Truth Telling Major Questions Will be Answered This Night!!!!” a date of “November 9th, 2024”, on that poster,
and then post that states
“all items for sale November 9, 2024 Bring your bags Big ones”
While I do think the original intention was to auction and sell these items I’m wondering by the cryptic way things are worded If this all is more to draw attention to the date Nov 9th, and something that will be taking place on that date. “All items”, might possibly be meaning all the “left behind dirty laundry” from the industry as a whole, not just in relation to Dr.ake.
2024: The Year of Truth Telling just feels like a reference to Katt Williams interview where he states that too.
Would love to hear more opinions, maybe more connections I’m missing?
The tweet saying
“Doing shit like "be there in 10" than show up in "2" Than wanna complain about preparation.”
Why’s the 2 in quotes? Seems to have significance.
Edited to add:
I don’t think the poster or the “auction” on November 9 are what they’re presented to look like. Trying to scour that poster for anything else that hints towards things.
Someone already made a connection with one of the numbers, yachts, and MBB with Drake on a yacht in Sydney when she was 13 (I think?)
So maybe there’s more to find from the poster

Forgive me for the initial ambiguity. I am not certain how to proceed, I just know that I have been given the green light to share this initial post. Take it for what it is:
Far too many are spending too much time and energy trying to solve a problem they don’t even have the right set of integers. It is quite literally impossible. Have you not ever wondered why great researchers who spend thousands of hours cannot land on anything concrete ?
Men and women have dedicated their life to figuring out the connections between the anomalous, to ultimately give up, or they ran out of time on this mortal coil. God forbid someone stumble onto the truth, and then conveniently get suicided. All of this connected, and really that is the point: Connection.
Currently, our government has spent trillions to solve this problem and to figure out who they are in bed with, and still they are in the dark. But many of them are okay with that as long as their pockets keep filling. See, for the Problem, existing in the shadows is their identity. The Problem excels in confusion and chaos. In drawing someone in just enough to keep them digging, but then driving them mad by having them feel around in the dark.
It is like Humanity is in a dark room. A big room, like a warehouse. And we are in the pitch black trying to find the light switch. Only, when someone gets too close, they either get turned the other direction, get tripped up, get locked up, or get gone. All the while, a few have on night vision goggles and orchestrate all the aimless wondering. Every once in a while, the searcher will stumble across a technology that pushes them towards the light switch, to then be thrown off course and continue to walk around aimlessly. In the pitch black, when someone “discovers” something, the others wondering around will begin to flock to that glimmer, to then be sidelined once again because the Problem loves to move large numbers of people towards an objective. It is a frustrating process and one that will continue until the lights are turned on.
However, many of our best and brightest have been co-opted to keep anyone and everyone from knowing the truth. They have falsely believed that those who desire to bring them to ruin are their allies. Over the years, many have woken up to the idea that maybe these NHI ‘friendlies’ aren’t friendly after all. Others have been so enthralled with the ‘gifts’ given to humanity, that they dismiss the possibility of these NHI’s are anything but benevolent.
Many of these “gifts” are found. In fact, all of the originals were found. How does that make sense? Pretend you are having an Easter egg hunt (not religiously speaking), and it is a grand ole time. Fast forward 5 days and you are out in the yard cutting the grass and you see a glimmer in the grass. Turns out, even though 5 days have passed, that egg is sitting where you left it. This is a very simple way of looking at it, but this is how the retrieval process began.
Many days (or ages) ago, objects were lost. Today, because of they know where the eggs are hidden, they can lead people to discover. Once discovered, the craft were studied and used to further our existence. Nowadays, the craft could be old that we discover, or it could be craft that are actually man-made, under the tutelage of NHI. The NHI can not easily manufacture in our dimension, so they tap the humans that best serve their purpose.
This can happen within an entity like the Armed Forces or a part of the Military Industrial Complex. This can also be done through organizations that we don’t readily know the name of, for example, have you ever heard of the Sonora Aero Club? Most have not, however, in the United States, this group was one of the first to be co-opted for a mission that they had no clue they were on. It makes me nervous to even write this, but we must try to find some semblance of light if we are going to make it out of this warehouse in one piece.
Men like David Grusch are diligent in their search, however, they will never be able to put the pieces together until they back up enough to see the Problem. Until it is diagnosed, we will look at pieces of a puzzle without having the box as a reference picture. The pieces of the puzzle: UAP, NHI, cattle mutilations, paranormal, etc etc, can’t be looked at as different problems—— they are the Problem.
There are entirely too many components for us to break down each in one post, but please just suspend skepticism for a minute and read this last part as if it were true:
There is an underlying glue to all things. A thread that ties us all together. In other dimensions (for lack of a better word), this thread can be woven together by groups of people having a similar idea, ideology intention, hope, fear, or sadness. Each individual thread, being part of the whole, is assembled into whatever dominates that person’s mind at that juncture. I know this sounds wild, but just imagine. Therefore, a group can be woven into a blanket that provides warmth and safety, or into a noose which could spell the end to all things. The Problem’s agenda is the latter. However, the people that are part of the Problem believe that they are making a blanket. This is why it is so hard to get people to see it for what it is: because it would mean humbling yourself and realizing that you have actually been working in the noose factory. Few people can admit their folly. Even fewer people can see they are part of the Problem because their pockets are stuffed or their power is enormous. The Problem is not stupid nor lazy, it will give you anything and everything it can to reel you in, because when the day comes, you will be tapped to do something you don’t want to do, but you must. That is part of being in bed with them, they control you.
That is all I have in me currently to share. I know that people will roll eyes, scratch heads, or dismiss completely. I am okay with that. I am not trying to sell you anything, just report on what I know to be true. I may share again, but I will answer questions best I know how. I leave you with 2 quotes:
“We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the US public believes is false” -CIA Director, William J Casey, 1981
“The last card is the alien card. They will build space-based weapons against aliens, and it is all a lie.” -Werner Von Braun, 1974-1977
PS- if you ask about specific anomalies, ie. crop circles, I may only have a theory as to "why" because I don't have information on everything. But it is ALL part of ONE problem.

One of the fascinating aspects of outsider reports and analysis is what they see. Given that at this point (1992) the internet was not yet widely available/accessible, this sort of thing would have been difficult to find. And of course SGI wasn't ever going to tell us the truth!
This will show you that SGI-USA (then called "NSA") was failing in recruiting far earlier than perhaps most of us in the US realized. SGI in the USA was basically a flash in the pan; it fizzled fast; and now it's just that rank stale smoke smell that lingers long after the fire's been put out.
This comes from Cults and Nonconventional Religious Groups: A Collection of Outstanding Dissertations and Monographs, "Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism and the Soka Gakkai in America: The Ethos of a New Religious Movement", Jane Hurst, 1992, pp. 150-151. Jane Hurst has some interesting research out there; while she tends toward being uncritically supportive of SGI, anyone who is making statistics available is a big help.

NSA members in the 1960s and 1970s were young (52% below age 30), more than half female (59%), and from a variety of occupations and social classes.

The Baby Boom generation were at most age 19 in, say, 1965 and at most age 24 in 1970.
This youthfulness is largely reflected in the early organization's origins in the American servicemen who returned from being stationed in Japan with their Japanese war-brides - those servicemen tended to be young and from a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds, as the draft was still in effect during that time period (ended March 1975). In addition, the first General Director of the US organization, Masayasu Sadanaga, initially targeted college campuses for recruitment by offering lectures on Buddhism. Sadanaga changed his name to George M. Williams in 1972, in obedience to the (short-lived) direction back then of Japanese leaders adopting American-sounding names (first AND last) in order to appeal more broadly to non-Japanese Americans.

The percentage of Oriental members steadily decreased as more and more white and black Americans joined NSA as seen in Figure 10, above.

Figure 10 (I'll get to that line in another post.)
Ewps - Here's the REAL Figure 10.
Most of the original "Oriental members" were those Japanese war-brides, whose first efforts to recruit new SGI members were directed toward other Japanese individuals.

NSA members came from the major religious traditions of Protestantism (30%), Catholicism (30%), and Judaism (6%). At the time these 1971 statistics were compiled, all areas of American society. By 1983, the age span was even more broad, with 11% of the members age 50 and above, 62% ages 30-49, 24% ages 20-29, and 3% below age 19.

For reference, here are the age ranges for the existing generations in 1983:

• Greatest: Ages 59-82
• Silent: Ages 38-58
• Baby Boomers: Ages 19-37
• Generation X: Ages 4-18
• Generation Y (Millennials): Age 3 or younger.

While these 1983 statistics aren't broken down by generation, here's what is clear:

• 11% of the SGI-USA membership was MUCH OLDER than Baby Boomers
• 62% was either Baby Boom generation or older (though younger than that oldest group)
• 24% was Baby Boomers
• 3% was younger than Baby Boomers.

This means that 97% of the membership of SGI-USA was Baby Boom generation OR OLDER!

IN 1983!!

Notice how this affirms the demographic estimate from this other research: "Soka Gakkai in America": Little appeal/interest outside of Baby Boom generation

Take a look at Table 4.
Specifically, the Age cohort (%) category.
For the Converts, 26% are older than Baby Boomers; 61% are Baby Boomers. That makes 87% Boomer and older. Only 14% are younger than Boomers.
No wonder SGI-USA is aging and dying, with these kinds of numbers!
We are seeing, like, 90% Baby Boomers in the group photos we've looked at.
The pictures back this up.
Also, this comment by an SGI-USA leader a few years ago during Minoru Harada's visit (anyone know what year that was?):

They [top SGI-USA leaders] then went off on how when we create these big-ass meetings, we shouldn't have to look into the crowd and see, and I quote, "A bunch of old-ass motherfuckers" The words of my "superiors", not mine. I think this is when they brought up the idea of 50K to my co-leaders and me. Source

"Old-ass motherfuckers" is all they have. How 'bout showing a little of that appreciation and gratitude SGI bangs on about??
Worse, "old-ass motherfuckers" is all SGI-USA can get.
Further, again referring to Table 4, SGI-USA's membership is solidly 2/3 women. That means it's going to be very difficult for women in SGI-USA to find mates to marry, which means childlessness will be more of a norm than an exception. Child-free is a valid and respect-worthy decision, don't get me wrong, but a religion's most reliable source of younger members is its own membership's children. Since SGI-USA's female members don't feel any responsibility or obligation to bear multiple children (like those poor, stupid Mormon sheepwomen do), there won't be any next generation to take over.
There's a reason so many religions have traditionally exhorted their membership to have lots of babies, why they condemn birth control and abortion. A big part of it is to keep their own numbers up! Source

It's the same problem happening in Japan within the Soka Gakkai:

On the other hand, aging is relentless. In terms of the Soka Gakkai's membership demographics, the "volume zone" where most members fall is the baby boomer generation who joined by the 1960s. They are now late elderly. In the past, the management of centers in various places was handled by the "Gajokai" consisting of Young Men's Division members, but it is no longer possible to secure personnel. Instead, in 2009, the Soka Gakkai launched the "Ojokai'' consisting of "middle-aged divisions,'' scolding them as "young people in their 50s'' and rushing to mobilize them. Source

GOOD LUCK!

For perspective, note that SGI-USA was managing to recruit just "1,000 per YEAR" - including all ages - between 1991 and 1999. Eight years of only 1,000 members added per year, with no accounting for the deaths or defections. Were the years after that more successful, recruiting-wise? I doubt it.

[Then-SGI-USA's public-relations director for the East Coast Bill] Aiken says SGI-USA has attracted about 1000 new members per year for the past eight years. - from 1999. Only 1,000 new members - across the ENTIRE 360+ million-person strong USA - in an ENTIRE year. And this extremely low level of success for EIGHT YEARS IN A ROW!! Source

From 2018:

In recent years, the number of young Soka Gakkai members has been decreasing rapidly . Looking at the participants in the simultaneous broadcasts and roundtable discussions, the majority are of the grandparents' generation, with only a small number of young people in their 20s and 30s, and the number of teenage boys and girls is almost an endangered species .
Therefore, what I am interested in is the population of Soka Gakkai by age group. This time, I would like to estimate the current population of Soka Gakkai by age , based on information I have personally seen and heard and verification from others . Please note that this estimate is very rough.
First, the largest number of Soka Gakkai members are baby boomers (born between 1947 and 1949 [Japan's Baby Boom]). This seems almost certain considering the history of the development of Soka Gakkai .
Also, the total number of members has already been verified by many people, and is estimated to be around 3 to 5 million people. This time we assume about 4 million people .
And this is what I heard directly from a staff member at headquarters last year, who said , `` The number of activists decreases by about 1/3 with each generation.'' I think this is a reasonable rate of decline that can be felt by looking at participants in simultaneous broadcasts and roundtable discussions. It seems that members who have stopped being activists are less likely to have their children join, so this time we will use a value of 1/3 per generation as the member decline rate .
Also, regarding the number of years it takes for generational change, the average age for men and women to give birth to their first child is currently 30 years old. Considering that the average age of childbearing for both men and women when the baby boomer generation was born was 24 years old, and that there are cases where not only the first child but also the second and third children are born, the generational shift will take 30 years. Let's calculate it as if it would take a year . In that case, the annual membership attrition rate would be (1/3)^1/30 = 0.964, or 3.6% .
It is unclear when this trend of declining membership started, but this time we will assume that it started in the year following the baby boom generation (1950). Source

And "Soka Gakkai is like an old people's club":

Regarding the problem of a decline in Komeito votes, or in other words, a decline in active Soka Gakkai members, many people concerned point out that the primary cause is the aging of Soka Gakkai members. The enthusiastic members of the generation who supported the growth of the society along with charismatic Honorary President Daisaku Ikeda are now elderly across the board. Most of the current new members are second- or third-generation members who join because their parents are members of Soka Gakkai, and they are not very enthusiastic about Soka Gakkai's activities. Today, many of Soka Gakkai's daily events are even derided by insiders as "like an old people's party."

And a more recent report (this year):

Back about 20 years ago a good friend and good guy, now deceased, from ChiTown, was commissioned by SGI Central Command to survey every contactable member of SGI in every district in America. The number he came up with was 5% of the number of Gohonzon passed out since, I guess whenever Gohonzon started to be passed out. The total number was about a million give or take, 20 years ago. These were contactable people, not practicing members. I remember going through lists of people we had on the books and trying to see if they could be reached. So the number we came up with was reported. Hearing nothing about it, I happened to run into my friend at some event at Soka U. He mentioned that he did the survey, and gave me the results. I believe he told me the facts. (Not everyone who practiced was a lying asshole.) So about 20 years ago SGI had about 50,000 “contactable“ people who had received Gohonzon. My estimate that about half of that number had zero interest in SGI. Thus 20 years ago, SGI had about 25,000 members still interested in SGI in some capacity. I think it’s the same number today. (2500 districts x 10=25,000.) Like I said before I went to FNCC twice last year, and everyone, including me, were old zany seniors. Neither conference was for old people. Conclusion: SGI is a senior citizen support group. When I joined in1969, we were all hippie ish, rejecting all the old shit, looking for something new and hip. Now SGI looks like old shit. Source

And another (this year or last):

When I joined 50+ years ago the ratio of youth to MD and WD was about 80:20. Now it's the reverse. Our goal is to move steadily back to a youth focus again. Source

Except it's obvious that SGI-USA doesn't HAVE "20% youth":

Youth? They've got to be fooling themselves!!! When I was still with the SGI last February (2023), I went to the kosen-rufu gongyo meeting at the center in my area. Mind you, the state I live in closed its center in 2021 for undisclosed reasons. That aside, the one I went to was in another state, and at that meeting, they had no byakuren, Gajokai, or Soka Group in attendance. Additionally, the only youth at the meeting were a few small children. Source
I feel that SGI is out of touch with anyone who’s younger than 60. The leaders are retired, have a lot of time on their hands and completely disregard the fact that people may work or have families. For young people it’s the old people taking nonsense. Source

The PROBLEM was already evident in 1983 - and none of the SGI-USA's big "Recruit-Youth-A-Thons", like "Victory over Violence" and "Rock The Ego Era" and "50K Liars of Just-Us" (everybody wants to forget the epic fail that was the "Gandhi, King, Ikeda" exhibit), has made the slightest difference in this demographic disaster. In fact, preparing for the 2018 "50K" event, SGI-USA likely had only 2,451 members in the 12-35 (or perhaps 11-39) age group, just 9% of the most generous SGI-USA active membership total (~30,000).

Ikeda could have preserved a "youthful" Soka Gakkai by passing the Presidency to a younger candidate, but Ikeda refused, because Ikeda was too focused on and obsessed with HIMSELF - his power, his prestige, his wealth, his status, his fame, his renown, HIM becoming leader of the world, his PERMANENCY, and his legacy. He refused to let anyone else come anywhere CLOSE to the power and control - he greedily, selfishly clutched it all tightly to himself and refused to share.
THAT is why the Ikeda cult Soka Gakkai/SGI is aging and dying. It's ALL Ikeda's fault, Ikeda's responsibility. IKEDA DID THAT.
Some "mentor". Source

SGI-USA has never managed to recover from that demographic bottleneck that happened no later than 1983.

A friend of mine started playing Fates for the first time, so once again I got bitten by the “complaining about Fates” bug. In particular, watching chapter 18 of Conquest again after so many years really got me going, and while the general consensus I’ve seen online about this chapters writing was negative, I wasn’t that satisfied by any of the overviews of it I read. I decided to give it a shot myself.
Dissecting why something doesn’t work is fun and all, but I think it’s also important to be constructive which is why I wanted to rewrite this chapter alongside my criticisms. I really do think there’s a lot of potential here that could have been the highlight of the entire story, and so I’d love to try my hand rewriting this chapter to be what it could have been rather than what we got. I have most of it done already, but Reddit only has so many characters before it cuts you off and this post is plenty long enough as is, so I’ll save that for another part coming up soon. This will be part 1, explaining what the chapter is and elaborating on my issues with it, while part 2 will be rewriting it along with my thought process and explanations.
Recap: https://fireemblem.fandom.com/wiki/Black_%26_White/Script
Corrin and Co are traveling when they decide to rest for the night at the nation of Izumo. They are greeted by Izana, the archduke of the kingdom, who seems to be a real goofball. After introducing himself, the levity is ended when it’s revealed the entire Hoshidan family has been invited here as well! Before any swords can be undrawn, Izana tells both parties that the kingdom has a strict neutrality pact neither of them can violate.
The scene cuts to later, where Ryoma enters Corrin and Xanders room to talk with them. Xander and Ryoma’s argument is cut short when Ryoma is dragged off by Nohrians. Turns out “Izana” is actually a Nohrian mage named Zola, who disguised himself to trick the Hoshidan royal family into a trap. Corrin and Xander don’t approve of such dishonorable methods to win, however, and fight to rescue their captives with Xander saying “we’ll win this war with honor or die trying”. After Leo kills Zola, the game cuts to later where we see Nohrians and Hoshidans alike having a meal, much to the delight of the real Izuma, who turns out is exactly as bizarre as the fake impression. Xander and Ryoma confirm with eachother that their fight will continue as usual, but Corrin states that no matter what happens they’re grateful they got to see both families eating together even if it’s not under the best circumstances, and the chapter ends with them saying they’ll revel in this feeling.
So on paper, I think this chapter is a great idea. Despite being at war, when one family is at the total mercy of the other, they lend a hand instead of kicking them while they’re down. This highlights how the two nations could accomplish so much together if only they weren’t at war with eachother. If utilized well, this could have been a great “eye of the tornado scene” emphasizing how tragic it is that these two families who share so much in common are forced by fate to fight eachother, making it all the more sorrowful when that’s brought to it’s conclusion through bloodshed. This would also encourage Conquest players to buy Birthright in a natural and subtle way as well now that they’ve had a nice sample of the other side. Of course, I don’t think this chapter was utilized well, and after reading the script again I believe it boils down to three major problems.
-Problem 1: The Lack of Worldbuilding Causes the Conflict to be Driven by Contrivances.
This is one of the many instances where the lack of fleshing out the world and it’s rules out really hampers the weight of the scenes. Unlike Awakening where there was a general cause-and-effect outlining the level structure, all of the Fates routes are much more individual and self-contained when it comes to chapters. This means the game has to really stretch itself to justify this elaborate setup being brought up and solved in one single chapter of regular length, and it’s very apparent when you write out the summary of events here.
Corrin and his army are just walking by when they happen upon the capital of the country. Corrin decides this would be a great place to rest for the night at and are instantly welcomed by its leader, who is also the only person in the game of that country. The entire Hoshidan family also just happen to bump into us because they coincidently came here at roughly the same time, with somehow neither party noticing the other until they were staring at eachother in the same room.
The only thing we know about this new nation we’ve never seen or heard about before is that it’s a peace-loving land with some sort of neutrality pact which means the two nations can’t fight here. What is the importance of this place that would entice all the Hoshidan royals to come over for a banquet in the middle of their country being invaded? Never explained. What exactly is this pact and what power does Izuno have to enforce it, if any? Never explained. Xander, prince of a nation at war and frontline general, has never heard of it. How does Garon or Iago never figure out or look into what happened here, considering the royals walked through their trap unharmed and everybody in charge of the trap vanished? Never brought up.
How many times here was this supposedly major event dependent on coincidences, seemingly important details left completely unexplained, and characters not knowing things that should be basic information of the world they live in? Things like all this quickly build up and make the world feel small scale and artificial, as if nothing truly exists until it’s in the peripheral vision of main characters. In a vacuum, this could all be excusable if the main meat of the chapter was just so dense and important that they just want a convenient excuse to delve into it. But about that…
-Problem 2: Nothing happens, either character-wise or plot-wise.
This is the only scene in both Birthright and Conquest where all eight of the royal families are together in one spot, and they’re unable to fight eachother. What a brilliant idea! How many great scenes could you come up with from this setup alone? How many directions could this move towards?

-The families bonding over their memories with Corrin (X)
-Calling eachother out for uncool actions, like Ryoma refusing to help Elise or Nohr siccing monsters on farming villages (X)
-Working together to defeat some threat they’d have trouble taking down on their own (X)
-Some cultural exchange (X)
-Some melancholy scene where, even if there’s a lot of resentment, they acknowledge how this may be the last time they ever get to have a meal with Corrin. (Somewhat?)
-Corrin sits down and has a mature conversation with his birth family elaborating on their choice to stay with Nohr (X)
-Some negotiation or debate between the two families about the future of their countries relationship, successful or not (X)
-Corrin being formally declared by the Hoshidan royals as a Nohrian, officially cutting them out of the family (X)

So what does Conquest do with this prompt? It does the unexpected route where all of them but Ryoma are shuffled out as soon as they’re introduced, captured offscreen, rescued offscreen, most of their dinner is offscreen, finishing their meal and leaving is offscreen, all of them sans Ryoma have barely any dialog, and none of them are even present in any of the CG’s.
We actually start off strong, Ryoma and Xander naturally puff out their chest and don’t get along when they’re in the same room, but seem to calm down when Corrin elaborates on how similar they are to eachother. But the game is so eager to get to fighting that it drags Ryoma away kicking and screaming before he even gets to share what he had to say to Corrin, let alone explore what having common ground means to the two of them.
1) I understand this is the Nohrian route so it makes sense the focus is mostly on them, but Takumi only gets three lines here, one of which is “…” Hinoka also only gets three lines, which I think is still more than she got in Birthright, and two of those lines are “You!” and “What are you doing here?”. Sakura lucks out as she’s the only sibling on either side who has anything to say whatsoever when Corrin says they’re grateful they could share another meal with the Hoshidans. That’s a start, but the fact remains Ryoma is the only sibling in the chapter whose remotely relevant, the rest could be omitted and nothing would change. They are only here to be damsels in distress heightening the stakes of defeating the local bad guy rather than providing any character development, checking up on how they are doing without Corrin and Azura, comparing and contrasting their differences between their counterparts, sharing any new information about them, foreshadowing Takumi’s possession, any notable interactions with their counterparts, etc. But no, nothing happens.
2) I also understand this is a video game and they don’t have all the time in the world before the next fight has to happen, yet Conquest is oddly completely uninterested in it’s own set-up. Zola, a minor chapter boss introduced and killed in this chapter, has more screentime and relevance here than any of the siblings, something you’d think would be the actual meat of the chapter they’d want to delve into.
The implications and weight of two dueling nations and families obligated to pause their fighting and dine with eachother could easily take up two or even three chapters as a pivotal arc, yet it’s completely blazed through as if the game considered it a cute novelty rather than a potential life-changing or history-changing moment. Simply put, it’s wasted potential, as if to say “Oh both of the two families meeting in a game about choosing between mutually exclusive families? Eh whatever.”
I wanna stick with just this chapter and not rewrite a good chunk of the entire story, but I can’t stress enough that in any other game this chapter would be the plot-defining moment paving the new way forward rather than chapter 15’s “we’ll expose Garon as a monster by helping him invade an innocent people.”
Neither of the two families are fighting because they outright want to, this isn’t a war about irreconcilable differences or mutually exclusive goals, the only reason for any conflict whatsoever as far as the game has shown us is that the guy in charge of Nohr is a sociopath who threatens to kill his own children at the drop of a hat. Sure, they probably won’t hold hands singing kumbaya after one extended conversation with eachother, but when all of them are in a truce far away from Garon’s authority having a meal together, nothing significant comes out of it plot-wise?
In fact, at the end of the day what significance happened here at all?

• -We learned about a new country, but we know very little about it and (other than Izama potentially joining the party later) absolutely none of it will be relevant after this chapter anyways.
• -Well, maybe this place is just set dressing so we have an excuse to meet up with our siblings again, but then nobody has any meaningful interactions, new info to share, planning ahead, or character development resulting from sharing scenes with them.
• -Then is the primary focus supposed to be on how this situation affects the Nohrian family? The antagonist and the conflict he brings is introduced and quickly solved without any consequences, with all the siblings instantly in agreement about stopping him. They don’t really talk amongst eachother about their feelings or how to go forward.

If there’s no juicy character interactions or exploration, and no setting up future events, then presumably the point of this big moment of Corrin and Xander leaping to save their enemies was made to show off that despite working in the same army, our heroes are indeed better than the swarms of war criminals under Nohr’s name we’ve seen and would never tolerate such things under normal circumstances. They’ve talked the talk about disagreeing with their father’s cruel methods, now here’s proof they’ll walk the walk, aren’t they such noble people? The way this is done however, opens up another can of worms…
-Problem 3: Protags come off as dicks
While our heroes are indeed more likeable and moral than blatant monsters like Garon and Hans, liking peace and disliking war crimes is not enough of a reason for a pat on the back. Our protags might not be burning villages for fun, but it’s difficult to take their proclaimed goal of peace seriously considering both the context of working for people who DO burn villages for fun and they way they handle themselves when presented with an opportunity to work on this supposed goal.
Corrin and Azura

• This is not seeing things under the worst possible interpretation to be a stick in the mud, Nohr is indeed invading Hoshido for no apparent reason and leaving war crimes wherever it’s armies go. Everybody in the building is aware of this to some extent.
  
• Azura and Corrin’s grand plan to expose Garon as a slime monster to his family indeed involves directly helping Garon conquer Hoshido, which they acknowledge will bring destruction and suffering that the nation and royal family have done nothing to deserve.
  
• Corrin and Azura are indeed presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity here to sit down behind closed doors and communicate anything, just anything significant at all, to the royal family that still seems to value them, but our heroes don’t even try or seem to acknowledge that. Corrin doesn’t have any interactions with them that last more than a sentence or two, and Azura is never acknowledged nor speaks to them.
  
• And yet despite, all this, both Corrin and Azura are quite pleased with the turn of events here, with Corrin acknowledging they’ll “probably try to kill eachother next time they see eachother” but that they’ll “revel in this feeling.”
  

Azura in particular is problematic here. During Odovakar 's excellent overview of the problems with Fates writing, he goes into detail about how Azura’s line about “this is all quite heartwarming. We're like one big family...albeit, a dysfunctional one.” in particular comes off as incredibly tone deaf and tasteless given the circumstances of Azura and Corrin marching on one family’s homeland for the sake of the other family. What I think was also worth noting is the context leading up to that line…

Sakura: I was just, um...th-thinking...it's really nice to finally see you again. I'm glad you... I'm glad you f-found a way to be happy... Corrin: Sakura... I'm happy to see you too. Sakura: R-really? You mean it?! Oh, Corrin! Elise: HMPH! Back off, you! He/She's my brothesister! MINE! Sakura: Ah! I'm s-sorry! Corrin: Elise! Mind your manners, little one. Elise: But she's trying to take you away from me... She's my archnemesis

Whether intentional or not, this is actually a very clever microcosm of the family’s conflict acted out by the youngest and most innocent among them who probably weren’t even born when the conflict started. The Hoshidan loves their sibling, but their time with Corrin is interrupted by the Nohrian shoving them away and declaring Corrin for themselves. This is a great way to challenge our protags to some introspection about themselves.

Azura: Heehee! Corrin: Azura? Did you just...giggle?

Instead, Azura just finds this a real knee-slapper. I understand maybe this is just meant to be a cute image of imoutos fighting over oni-chan Corrin and nothing more, but the context makes it very hard to swallow the narrative’s insistence that all this is “heartwarming” as Azura puts it. Keep in mind that all the Hoshidan nobles are sitting at the same table watching all this. Do you think Ryoma also finds it funny that his little sister is scared off and declared an archnemesis by the daughter of the man who killed his father in cold blood? Do you think Hinoka also thinks it's like one big dysfunctional family when Corrin is preparing to march on her homeland with an army?
I get it, I totally know what they were going for, and in a vacuum it could be a great line making for a properly bittersweet moment. “Even if the two are at eachothers throats and the future is bleak, me and Azura are grateful we get to have at least one big normal dinner together like a real family.”
But the future is bleak because of Corrin and Azura participating in an invasion, the families are at eachothers throats partially because Corrin and Azura haven’t accomplished anything to reform Nohr. If anything, Corrin should feel great shame here. Elise just unintentionally reenacted the history between the nations where Nohr was clearly in the wrong, and Corrin is sitting directly across and staring at the family who’ve done nothing wrong to him yet are going to be hurt because of Corrin’s decision. Grateful they could spend time with them again? Maybe. But cheerful and laughing?

ProZD: D-did an alien write this game? blows gently

But at least Corrin doesn’t show outright contempt for the family they’re screwing over…
Xander and Leo

Xander: Corrin! There's no need to insult me like that. I could not possibly be anything like this sorry excuse for a prince. … Xander: We will win with honor or die trying. Come, Corrin. Let us go set free our sworn enemy. … Corrin: Heh, sorry... It's just that you and Ryoma really are so much alike. If you weren't on opposite sides of a war, I think you could have been great friends. Xander: Yeesh... Do me a favor and keep that nonsense in your head where it belongs. … Xander (to Ryoma): We only acted as Nohrian royals should. When we leave this place, you'll be nothing but an enemy to be defeated once more.

Okay, but why? Ryoma is not the one Xander overheard laughing to himself about how much he’s going to make Corrin suffer. How are the Hoshidan royals “nothing but enemies to be defeated” here when they’re just trying to defend their homeland from somebody who assassinated their king at a peace meeting? Where is all this contempt from Xander coming from?
It’s perfectly understandable he doesn’t get along super well with Ryoma because of the tensions between their nations, that makes sense, but I see no reason for why Xander is making several petty insults to his face unprompted, let alone so nonchalant and even somewhat eager to get back to waging a war Xander himself calls “a senseless war of greed and madness” in the epilogue.
He doesn’t treat his own people much better this chapter, declaring Zola and his henchmen as “traitors” to be “dealt with” for their dishonorable methods when ironically Zola taking over the country by disguising himself as the archduke is actually one of the least evil and self-destructive things we’ve seen the kingdom do so far. It must be emphasized that every sibling was in the same room watching Garon demand Xander kill Corrin if he interferes with killing POWs for his amusement, and half of them were in the same room when Garon ordered his henchmen to murder every singer they can find in a neutral country. So a few hundred or thousand innocent people, most of whom would presumably be young woman, murdered to snuff out potential assassins. Or Garon directly ordering the deaths of unarmed civilians in chapter 13 with Hans relaying “Villagers are just soldiers who haven’t picked up a sword yet.”
Xander talks a big game in this chapter about how “we’ll win this war with honor or die trying”, but how do you honorably win a war when your nation is constantly and openly rushing to pointless overkill brutality like this at every turn? What moral high ground does this country have that Xander is so determined to preserve he kills loyal soldiers over what he sees as sullying it, when at no point in the game does the influence of Nohr ever do anything but make life significantly worse? His sudden fervor towards doing the right thing is completely contrasted later on when Xander is the one telling Corrin there’s no justice to be found in war and you just gotta do what you gotta do rather than what’s morally right, in response to Corrin being upset the Nohrian army is killing woman and children who looked at them funny.

“Justice is an illusion, a fairy tale…Letting innocents die is a tragedy, but so is letting the chance for peace slip away. This is war. There is no such thing as a clean win when lives are on the line.”

“Justice is just a fairy tale, innocent people getting screwed over is something we have to accept in war because there’s no such thing as a clean win! But also we better win this senseless war of greed and madness with honor or die trying!”

• If “justice is an illusion”, how is killing Nohrian soldiers to free people who are apparently “nothing but enemies to be defeated” so you can fight them later on terms you prefer, directly prolonging a war which will lead to much more deaths on both sides, for the benefit of Nohr? By Xanders own logic, is this not letting the chance for peace slip away since there’s no such thing as a clean win? Forget Garon and Iago, I’m confident the citizens back home whose loved ones got conscripted would be the ones demanding his head if they found out about this. A very charitable interpretation is that ending the war this specific way will cause more chaos and fighting in the long-term compared to if they conquered and oppressed an innocent nation fair and square, but that’s nowhere to be found in the script whatsoever.
  
• If Xander believes in “We’ll win this war with honor or die trying”, why is he still following Garon? Garon is winning the war in part thanks to honorless and extreme acts of cruelty like blackmailing the Ice Tribe or making an example out of Scarlet’s body, yet instead of taking action against him like he does with Zola, Xander is instead the most loyal sibling to him to the point Corrin decides the best way to get him on his side is to expose Garon as a literal slime monster? Where’s Xander’s zeal of “Come Corrin, let’s go save our sworn enemies” when his father orders Hans is go through killing injured and surrendering foes who were promised they be spared? Where’s his conviction shown here about “not letting treachery go unpunished” when his father outright says he couldn’t care less about the welfare of his people and he’ll just kill anybody who complains to make an example?
  

I understand one might get the impression I’m going off topic or selectively picking and choosing quotes here from all over the game, but no matter how you look at it Xanders beliefs, morality, and priorities are just all over the place depending on what the plot needs him to do. This means not only is his motivation for helping his enemies here faulty no matter how you look at it, but it also makes the extreme lengths he goes to do so, killing his own subjects who won him victory on a silver platter because it wasn’t a “proper” victory, come off as baselessly self-righteous at best and outright cruel at worst.
I’m sure the game would assure us Zola and all his mooks are terrible people who had it coming, but the issue is no matter how virtuous you portray Xander and creepy you portray Zola, Xander is still directly managing the war for a megalomaniac and helping him achieve his goals in spite of his long history of open sadism and public crimes that make Zola look like a saint. By ignoring the clear root cause of Nohr's dishonor while going this hard against random goon's participating in dishonor, instead of being a gallant preserver of morals, he comes off like a bully who selectively picks and choices punishment.
On the topic of punishment, it particularly rubs me the wrong way how Leo just casually mercs Zola at the end, keep in mind Birthright confirms for all his faults he actually isn’t a complete monster like Garon and dies trying to help the protag.

Leo (smiling portrait): You’d probably rather die than live with the shame, correct? In that case…
Zola: Eek! No, please! M-m-milord... I was wrong! S-so wrong! I have seen the error of my ways! P-please...spare my unworthy life!!
Leo (still smiling): Make peace with it, Zola. Perhaps on the other side you will find forgiveness.

Leo makes a fair argument that the stakes are too high and Zola can’t be trusted not to snitch, but this is bit sadistic, no? One of the most powerful people in the country is smug and sarcastic as he’s getting ready to execute somebody whose bleeding on the ground begging for his life and genuinely confused as to why we’re upset with him. I know the intent of “I was wrong! I have the seen the error of my ways!” is supposed to be him saying whatever Leo wants to hear to weasel out of punishment, but that’s exactly the thing, he’s fully cooperating and doing everything he can to appease this guy. And then he’s just killed like a dog without trial or final words, presumably using the spell that skewers you with tree branches.
Didn’t the game use killing defeated foes like this to establish Garon as a bloodthirsty monster? Why is Corrin just standing there watching this happen? This exact same scenario in Birthright has them jump to spare Zola, but here their disapproval is very meek and only voiced after the deed is already done. It’s still apparently too much for Leo though, who chastises Corrin for being “too soft…I envy your innocence.” And then he declares the matter settled on their behalf.
I’m sure this scene was meant to show off Leo’s pragmatism and strategy skills, but it just makes him look like a sociopath and Corrin look spineless. And that’s the biggest issue with this chapter to me, more than the plot being driven by contrivances that aren’t explained or the lack of any character development or interesting scenes taking advantage of the setup, the actions and dialog of our protags don’t match the noble heroes the narrative insists they are:

• Corrin is openly enjoying spending time with innocent people they’re throwing under the bus so Corrin won’t have to risk their relationship with the Nohrian siblings by directly fighting Garon. They then clearly disapprove of Leo executing a surrendering foe begging for mercy but stand idle watching it happen.
• Azura sits directly across her former family who’ve been very negatively impacted by her decisions and actions, and will continue to be so in the future, yet she’s giggling about the conflict and doesn’t seem to be taking the fact that her two families might kill each other seriously.
• Xander insults Ryoma as a sorry excuse for a prince, and afterwards kills his own subjects to prolong a war of aggression so it can be won the way he personally wants it to be won.
• Leo seems to be having a good time killing somebody who’s surrendered and begging for his life. He then chides Corrin for being “too soft” when they wish that didn’t have to happen.
• And again, for no apparent reason, neither Corrin or Azura do the bare minimum to clue to the Hoshidans about what’s going on or even have a meaningful conversation with them despite claiming to care for them. This is the golden opportunity they were hoping for, yet they apparently spend the entire dinner instead talking to eachother about how happy they themselves are.

These are not the actions of heroic characters.
Summary: Overall, this is a very bizarre chapter. It feels like something meaningful happens here at first glance, your brain sees what’s going on and knows that this is supposed to be a huge moment. Peaceful music playing, a very well-drawn CG of dozens of individual units, liberating a country from Nohrian control, Corrin and Azura are happy and say some lines that sound like they should be deep and impactful.
But when you step back and analyze the bigger picture and context, you find that more or less embodies all of Fates writing, both good and bad. It has a brilliant premise that gets your mind going, excellent presentation to accompany it, and some individual scenes or dialogue in a vacuum are very welcome. If you’re a casual player who just wants context for your favorite characters fighting, it’s easy to feel satisfied at first glance and move on thanks to those factors, especially since the gameplay and MyCastle are very fun. At the same time, there’s no denying the severe flaws that hamper the experience.
Despite being the hyped-up main draw of the chapter, our exciting premise that opens so many doors is almost completely neglected in favor of (once again) exposition on meaningless settings and characters that aren’t relevant anywhere else and also reminding us how evil Nohr is, to the point the chapter title is Black and White. The context makes it very difficult to take the plight of our heroes seriously due to their lack of action (both before and in the present) to achieve their proclaimed goal despite ample opportunity, the proaction they do have being unnecessarily extreme and self-serving, and a narrative that insists they are in the right at every turn despite the results clearly showing us otherwise. There’s definitely bits and pieces of something great buried in all this teasing us, otherwise I wouldn’t be interested enough to write this much all these years later, but as is it’s just a mess. An enjoyable mess, but a mess all the same.

But what do you guys think of Conquest Chapter 18: Black and White? Do you also consider it a wreck, or was there something positive here you believed I missed? What would you like to see in a potential rewrite of it?

MDP(Most Demonic Perverts).
They will repeat “Join us” until you go insane. What throws these deranged psychopaths into a frenzy is when their evil venomous words do not bother, reach or harm the person
Each and every night, MDP conducts an air raid of High Altitude Pseudo Satellites, swarming the atmosphere, hijacking actual satellites to spy for their human trafficking and prostitution organization.
Each MDP facility contains a male homosexual drill instructor training prostitutes on how to capture people, how to trick people into signing a contract.
Do not let these extremist radical terrorists force you into suicide or anything, hold out! The more that are resilient, the quicker this will be resolved.
Once these radical terrorist biohackers successfully causes an individual to commit suicide or die in anyway, they burst from the persons dead body, giggling and laughing as they kill humans for fun and infects another person as if they were a horrific virus.
They bulge and twitch the persons eye lids as a sign of their technology’s existence within the person. If you notice any of these signs in either you or your family, you and/or them have been hijacked by biohackers.
This is an outbreak of radical terrorists in high platform airships and drones, illegally eavesdropping and trafficking humans into sex prostitution utilizing electromagnets, radio waves, and radiation
They can force a person to cough with sonic weaponry, imitating illnesses on a wide scale for control and as well, to assimilate identities illegally.
Don’t believe me! Research it!
STDs are being used to keep a person stuck within their prostitution rings.
MDP is an entire organization of drug addicts with advanced technology trafficking humans. They are all the same, against the people, not one of these demon-lovers are on the people’s side.
Cesspool homosexual orgies with drugs and STDs are systematically given to new cult members to keep them stuck in one place.
Whatever you do, do NOT care about them. They will try to use your empathy to have you kill yourselves.
Don’t panic! The hostiles are on Debilitating/Sedative drugs. Stop your bitching and fight your way through it until the threat is resolved. Keep relaxed. Let your friends, family, and kids know! Awareness destroys their recon
It’s NOT the “Illuminati”.
Keep Calm/Be Confident and Live.
Study magnets/Electromagnets.
You are not missing out on anything if someone or a group is pressing on you. Go do you! Do not let anyone influence you!
Their command centers are hidden within some call centers (Do not be paranoid!). It is urgent that you stay on the surface if you work around them. Do not let them systematically control or allure you into signing a contract to an unknown authority to make love with their merchandise in plain sight as spies or to be involved in illegal reconnaissance operations.
As long as you do not sign a contract for, and I quote, “everything you always wanted!” You will be fine.
YOU ARE NOT INVITED! Do not submit to any of their offers! They can alter words in the mind with their weaponized drones.
Stop Feeding This World Wide Threat!
Stop Surrendering because it’s too much to deal with! They are on high class drugs nearly 24/7 everyday!
Reclaim your identity or have it taken away by a criminal organization!
Non-lethal weapons modified to be lethal weapons!
Their captive women/children are their front line against men! They WILL try to force you to kneel to the their dictator, Solih, the shapeshifting hybrid. You will then be susceptible and subjected to heavier sonic attacks as well as abuses.
Do Not Quit! Do NOT Surrender!
Observe them for one year if you do not believe me. Take notes, keep quiet and carry on with your own personal life in the meanwhile. You will take notice of their patterns.
MDP terrorists are pretending to be schools as part of their scripts! They murder doctors and healers of any kind if they do not submit to being trafficked into human/sex trafficking facilities/homes!
They are not Authority of any kind, unless you surrender and you sign their contract and accept them as your handlers.
THIS IS NOT A GAME!
Stall them out! Do not move!
I can’t believe I am stating this. What is written below is not intended to be satire or a joke. This has actually contributed to their narcissism, their abuses, and mass murders
Stop masturbating to these terrorists! They are raping and abusing you and your fellow citizens, HEAVILY! Your fellow Maldivians are being raped over sonar hearing that only YOU can hear, and you masturbate to the Maldivians moaning, being raped??
You do NOT need to sign a contract to the MDP using sonar hearing to be allowed to marry, be intimate, or are subjected and forced to “marry” their trained terrorists.
They are paid liars and spies that trains prostitutes how to screw their targets exactly the way their targets want. This is done to have the target “test” the human traffickers prostitutes before they sign to keep them. Instead, you are selling yourself into human/sex/drug trafficking rings
Do not accept their “lust” they do have spies in person that are drug abuse/humans traffickers. They will bribe with sex and “free housing” then make you sign your life away, with you under the impression that you are going to some brothel or “sex club”. You will be susceptible to extreme abuses revolving around rape, drugs, and traumatic physical and mental abuses. Sound Proof Your Homes!
THEY ARE ALL THE SAME!!
They use prostitution to allure their new victims! DO NOT BELIEVE THEM!
The MDP consists of homosexual elitists, human traffickers, terrorists, Eavesdroppers/Spies utilizing sonic weapons/sonar hearing weapons to euthanize/Traffic and enslave the general public. DO NOT GO!
They will go to war with federal officials/agents to keep their bodies enslaved!
Their cults authority are primarily shapeshifting Reptillian-Jinn-Human hybrids that are seeking “World Domination utilizing Sonic weapons” in an attempt to force the innocent and the vulnerable into surrendering themselves to human/sex/drug trafficking ring.
They are not the police!
Spies are very obvious to point out!
They are illegally eavesdropping families to extract their young. Their groups primarily consists of autistic and the mentally ill, that abuses a series of class A drugs to traffick and create new slaves.
Do NOT sign the contract! It’s ridiculous! They have two contracts, one for you to surrender, and the other for you to contract yourself into surrendering voluntarily. They also wordplay aggressively.
( I am disclosing the depths of their criminal business for abusing sonar hearing technology to assimilate identities, killing ruthlessly while induced under highly potent drugs, mass kidnappings, weapons, and prostitution/pedophilia. You will be stripped of all privileges and rights to these lifelong detention facilities!)
The threat progresses like humans, but the hostiles are progressing entirely against your person.
They are trying to steal your entire identity, do not sign the contract! Otherwise you will never make choices in your own lives again!
They look like everyday people, but do not be paranoid. Be aware of your surroundings and leave a way out for yourself if you are ever caught in a potentially dangerous situation. But do NOT be paranoid, delusional, or psychotic about it as not only would you be more susceptible to any abuses, your vulnerabilities may force you to make the wrong decisions. Man/woman up if you want to keep your own free self.
Do not give into extreme paranoia!
Most Demonic Perverts human trafficking networks has expanded. Be weary of unknown terrorists/individuals giving victims rides to parties, “mansions”, or a trip to the ghetto islands for drugs
They are not the police! They are not aliens!
They will use love to manipulate you.
Think of online scams or common pop up scams you would receive on your daily Internet commute. Same thing except, they want you to traffick yourself into a entrapment facility. Using various sexual exploitation tactics, infinite gaslighting strategies to force negative emotion to their targets and threats a long with actions of inhumane abuse cycles in hopes of subduing their targets
If you accept any bribes and sign the contract offered, you will be paying taxes to a criminal organization/network, times the current state and/or government taxes you already currently pay for, along with any other extra expenses that will occur if you sign the contract.
Ex: Government Taxes + Criminal Organizations Taxes = Taxes x2 or more since you will not be in control of your currency any longer.
If you do not see actual law enforcement individuals in front of your physical self, DO NOT GET ON THE GROUND! They are NOT any authority to the people outside of their trafficking homes!
Drug abuse/Addictions attracts these hostiles. They WILL psychologically trick you into subduing yourself.
Do not be fooled by their fake friendly appearances and smiles. You will be robbed!
Pay attention to your aiground horns! But do not panic!
They are NOT the government or federal agents. They are spies from criminal organizations worldwide!
If you do not believe me, then what I am speaking of may not not make any sense to you now. (Do your own research, don’t take only my word for it) But a great number of those who reads my news update will understand that we are dealing with outlaws that are mainly responsible for the random disappearances of children.
Be aware of homes with “No trespassing” signs, unusually high activity and surveillance cameras in ghetto islands.
They are not the MNDF/MPS/NASA/God/You/yourself/or anybody else you know. Even though some has defected and joined this horrific network full of criminals and pathological murderers, pretending to be friendly or family.
Global Human Trafficking Evolution
They want to ultimately farm your kids and sell them into prostitution!
Human traffickers will start a ground war to capture their victims and to keep spying on them with aircrafts.
Cyber ventriloquism/Sonar Hearing, common tactics.
This has been worsening since 2008.
The criminal agents will immediately disinform and satire this disclosure or any as if nothing was wrong or happening right now.
Educate yourselves to save yourselves! This is NOT a test from any governments within the security fields (MNDF, MPS or any other) though these organizations may or may not be involved, credible evidence is needed to prove that these organizations are apart of the worlds most inhumane experiments utilizing electromagnets and radiation to subdue any man or woman.
Disinformation campaigns are set up and used by the villainous organization to keep the public from knowing about their “spying” on various individuals around the world and from raising awareness on their secret experiment using electromagnets and a machine that rewrites the brain in a flash.
The threat mimics medical conditions to stay hidden. Very heavy human/sex trafficking organization and operations getting worse everyday.
This is NOT a special or a unique opportunity for anyone, do not fall for this! You will be chipped, trapped, and abused inhumanly like a wild animal.
They also possess disinformation campaign divisions made solely for the purposes of covering their trafficking and tracks.
The technologically driven human traffickers will preemptively meditate on murdering you if you do not reclaim your identity!
Do NOT surrender yourself to MDP! Traffickers are seeking your signature to lock you away inside a facility.
Do NOT play hero or games with extremists. They are studying every word, step, and actions you make. With the goal to either capture, subdue, or mind break an individual into harming theirselves and/or other’s.
The traffickers wagers that they can defect millions into trafficking the victims into their criminal networks/organization and facilities around the globe, the organization calls it “hiding bodies” utilizing the individuals past as their entire method to cause the person as much psychological harm as inhumanly possible.
Powerful electromagnetic radiation is beamed into the victims skull to send and receive data, bypassing the skull to access the brain as if it was a computer hard drive. The program is only to torture and ruin lives. If not forewarned about it, lives will be abducted, or killed secretly.
Traffickers can completely invade and compromise a person and force the victim into either surrendering theirselves to their abusers and never be seen again, or the victim is left with nothing, outstripped from jobs through 24/7 focus groups to psych a person out of a job and attempt to have their victims deconstruct theirselves and others around.
This is an everyday 24/7 torture system designed to traffick, kill, torture, and molest an individual.The traffickers breed with their brothers, sisters and other blood related individuals for experimental and pedophila is a major part of their cult, DO NOT BE FOOLED!
PEDOPHILIA, TORTURE, NECROPHILIA, RAPE! These are four pillars of the Most Demonic Perverts.
Silent/Covert inbreds are waging war against innocents
All out war with mankind on one side and Most Demonic Perverts on the other.
Hostiles are taking hostages secretly through aggression and various fear tactics. MDP terrorists can cut breathing with their weapons.
Love your spouses and who you are and they may spare you by moving on to someone else.
Protect yourselves with neodymium magnets!! Protect your brain with magnets! Hover the magnets over your head.
(This is NOT fake news, we have been compromised, completely and utterly compromised!)
DO NOT GO!!! There is nothing there that will benefit you!
MDP preys on any vulnerabilities that a human possess. Stay strong to those that are affected, investigations are becoming more widespread
They entrap individuals for experimental purposes in a room with 1 bathroom and 40+ prostitutes and drug addicts, and other mentally ill criminals who enjoys their jobs in systematically destroying human lives in the most inhuman and extreme ways.
They are lead by drag queen homosexuals with a goal to create slaves by converting them into homosexuals, making it easier to control individuals.
They also have these systematic gay orgies where they abuse a plethora of drugs (crack, meth, cocaine, scopolamine, etc) before severely abusing and raping a singular victim inhumanly. The victims were once a targeted individual before they gave up and accepted becoming a sacrifice for MDP.
If you are a new victim of these crimes, do as much research as possible and disclose, disclose, disclose. DO NOT MOVE TO VOICES THAT ARE NOT AROUND YOU!
Schizophrenia is NOT the reason due to the lack of evidence, proving that schizophrenia does not exist. Do not keep silent for this horrendous criminal network! They are all traffickers and they kill in the most inhumane way and call it their “fun”.
TLDR: MDP is a nefarious organization of drugged up lunatics. The are traffickers and are replicating theirselves to be your spouse, military officials, or any government identity to force and fool any person into trafficking theirselves into a criminal network through endless gaslighting through megaphone like devices that targets one individual at a time and projects their voices bypassing their targets auditory cortex. Once the drone targets a person, they stay on that person 24/7 everyday. If you are instructed to move to Winnipeg Canada or anywhere for bribes, sexual favors, money, and/or free housing through any means of transportation, Do Not Go! You are a victim of a class action crime that has gone out of hand. Do NOT give these criminals anymore power by giving yourself up to them. You did not win anything and being targeted by these drones means that they chose you to either traffick or to be murdered covertly using drones with electromagnetic weapons attachments and technology which allows sonic hearing that the MDP criminal organization network uses to communicate directly to one another without needing to use a phone. Captured victims are forced into unpaid labor and forced prostitution. The targeted victim will be missing and stored away within one of their run down homes/facilities, unable to escape or leave. The handlers forces their new members into various ritualistic initiations cycles within their cultist group kneel, to sniff up drugs.
Once captured, they immediately commence their routines of total control and exploitation of the fully captured person. The victims are broken down to less than nothing due to repeated rape and abuse sequences. Felons within the MDP organization are to either traffick or murder a victim because their data brokers does not want to exposed and has paid a great sum of currency to illegally purchase the personal records of their targets and to send a weaponized drone to the illegally purchased individual, equipped with biohacking weapons to break down their targets into trafficking themselves, committing suicide or murdering others. They run criminal schools/organizations that breeds more human traffickers and prostitutes into the public. They Will Say Anything to Force You to move!
“We need you!” “We love you, Move!” “We want to lust your body.”
They work on every emotion within their targets brain and force the individual either into a blind rage or to try to confuse the person with their own emotions through a series of gaslighting and abuse, into moving their targets to them (I can not stress this enough, do not let them force you into trafficking yourself.
The felons also pretend to be some type of close friend to their victims in order to keep control over them. They are fully trained and prepared personally to place severe torture on one individual (they pair up and gang up on one individual at a time and “jumps” said victim. They act like grade school kids, but that’s due to the heavy influence of their handlers, crack and cocaine that has degenerated them. They also are heavily involved in the drug/prostitution ring where everyone gets raped and are all under heavy mind control from a cocktail of different drugs including cocaine.
The felons has their victims set up as empty puppets who are under complete control. The victims now turned felons/rapists/addicts are raised specifically to absorb abuse, while abusing drugs to remain numb during their operations, scopolamine, crack and cocaine to remain numb to any words from their victims.
They train individuals this way so they can deal more damage than receive it during their illegal operations. They are completely separate from reality and are all under one criminal control.
They are aware of people resisting and they promise to do everything to try to force their targets into submitting to their handlers. Warning! These Malicious Drone Operators WILL Say ANYTHING to force a person to move!
The terrorists all have their handlers speaking directly into their ears during their operations to murder or capture the innocent, giving them orders on their scripts made to place torture and destroy random individuals, innocent or not.
They tend to target the innocents more since these felons find it more satisfying to rape, brainwash, and intoxicate the innocent heavily until the innocent is completely empty. As soon as as they’re successful, they turn the captured individuals into drug addicts, whores, and forced laborers, working for gift cards and sexual/party favors.
They will always refuse to leave their targets unless the person gives in and moves to them. Or if the victim gathers any evidence leading to the arrest and shutdown of MDP
To the many different individuals that takes the time to read this, I am taking the time and energy out of my life to warn everyone about a massive data breach that has occurred and that is endangering many lives, including my own at this very point in time.
This type of data breach is the very worst of its kind. Before, the biggest threat was internet crimes, malware, and viruses that may have affected your assets if you were to click the wrong link. Now your actual physical being is at risk by MDP data brokers who are currently funding these criminal networks and are providing illegally purchased records of random individuals around the world.
Now, the MDP criminals today have gone above and beyond the internet and are sending drones with biohacking technologies attachments to random individuals. These weapon attachments magnetizes to specific muscles within the human anatomy of the hijackers choosing. This allows the hijacker to manipulate small muscle tissues within the human body such as rotating an individuals eyes at the hijackers will to keep their victims sleep deprived. They focus on the genitals primarily to exploit the human desire to make love with another individual through the manipulation of their genitals such methods, human traffickers and terrorist organizations are now utilizing these magnetic weapons attached to drones to lock a persons own body up for ransom which could be assets, or force you to sell your body into slavery.
They offer the remote of the victims body, to the victims they use to manipulate certain muscles and veins in the body in exchange for the capture of the victims body.
MDP human traffickers have evolved from footwork to airborne to stay covert. Hiding behind custom biohacking drones ordered online and through various other biohacking black market trades.
“Voices in the head” has been declassified and debunked as electronic biohacking through electromagnets, radiation, drones and neurophones funded and powered by criminal Fusion Centers, MDP who fund radical extremists and terrorists around the world. This was thought out to be a medical condition that is often confused with schizophrenia or another mental illness. But I challenged the theory and discovered that the public has been heavily misinformed.
If a person never had a history with voices in their head that were not of their own voices, and they have proof of their attackers transmitting these frequencies, how could it be a medical condition if the person has evidence of the voices being transmitted directly to his/her skull? So, not only the voices are there, they are also instructing people to either murder, rape, or traffick themselves to one of the many fusion centers, human/sex trafficking homes within undisclosed locations, “ghettos”, and divisions that could be in any closed off homes, (homes with unusually active activities) so they could focus and convert their captives through a series of abuse and ritualistic routines 24/7 everyday.
They force the individual to impregnate one of their paid prostitutes that are doppelgängers to their targets. They do this to raise another human into being another drug addict/trafficker, born and raised into the criminal network so it’ll appear more natural to kill, traffick and brainwash victims.
The MDP pretend to be on the victims side, but they really are not. They all have an illegal drill instructor that only teaches the trafficked “warloot” abuse, rape, and how to torture.

Hi all,
First, this is a long post, and for that I apologize. I have a lot on my mind I’m trying to process right now. I’m also a creative writing minor, so I realize this will come across as a story.
I attend a fairly conservative college where most of the students being Christian. I myself am not religious, and due to the environment I try to keep that fact to myself so as not to be rude or disruptive. Some people do know about my lack of belief, and I’ve had mixed responses from them when they learn. Some want to convert me, others are rather nonchalant about it.
The reason I am writing is because I recently had a conversation with one of my literature professors that has left me wondering how I should respond. The conversation started after I asked him a follow up question to something he mentioned about the Bible: “That it’s the greatest story about the human condition humanity ever told.” For context, he’s been a Catholic his entire life.
My follow up question to him after class was this: “But if it’s just a story, why should we believe it, especially when there seem to be so many contradictions within it?” This tends to be my first question when someone makes a claim about the Bible, and it is born partly out of curiosity (I genuinely want to know why, as no Christian I’ve talked with has given me a good answer to it) and partly as a challenge, as I don’t want to see him wasting his life worshipping something that isn’t true. Perhaps this is not the best motivation, but it is what sparked my question.
He didn’t answer right away, but when he did this is (roughly) what he said: “My favorite story is William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I think it, while being fictitious, presents a deep understanding of human nature. I read it to understand the characters, and, by understanding them, hopefully learn a little bit more about myself and others in the process. Does it matter if it is true? Depends on what you mean by true. If you mean it in the sense of “this actually happened,” then you will be disappointed by a lot of literature. But if you mean it as “this reveals an important quality of human condition,” then I think it is very true.” He then chuckled and added, “Your question reminds me of a quote one of my professors told me when I was a student: ‘Everything in the Bible is true; some of it actually happened.”
This surprised me, as this is the first time I had really talked with someone who didn’t take the Bible (specifically the creation story) literally. I clarified with him to make sure I understood him correctly, and he affirmed what I said.
I probed him a bit more about that, asking if the fact that it was written by humans makes it less trustworthy. Why should we place so much faith in something that was written by mere men? I figured he would say something like “God wrote the Bible,” as that is what people I know have said.
He paused again and thought. His eventual response was this (if I recall correctly): “I have two reasons for why I believe in the Bible, one reason for believing in God, and one additional reason for why I am Catholic. The first reason for why I believe in the word of the Bible is because I think it is written by God. Unfortunately, that isn’t the most convincing reason even for myself, as why should I believe it is written by God? This leads to my second reason, which is that I simply find the story of the Bible presents to be the most beautiful and brilliant work to ever exist. I have spent years studying the intricacies of the Bible simply because I find its underlying themes and its story of human failure and promise for redemption to be gripping and compelling. Shakespeare doesn’t even come close, in my opinion. If it’s not written by God with human hands, then I don’t know what is. But this still is built upon believing that God exists, so let’s go to why I think that.
"The way I see it, faith is a natural part of human life. It is impossible to find a functional person who doesn’t trust something, and trust is one of the pillars of faith, so similar in fact that I view it as faith. If everything in the world is man-made and artificial, without divine influence, I think at the very least I would still choose to believe in the word of the Bible because I find it the most beautiful thing in the world. A large part of the reason I believe in God is because I think it is natural to have faith in something. If I am going to have faith in something no matter what, I want my faith to be in something beautiful, intellectually rigorous, and good for humanity.
“This leads into my reason for being Catholic, which is in large part it is because I think it presents the most holistic, beautiful, and practical theory for human success. Everything it teaches is geared toward human success, both individually and socially. People might disagree with what the Catholic Church defines as “human success,” but I think the Catholic Church is onto something.”
I asked him to elaborate, and he explained how the Catholic Church (if I understand correctly) places great emphasis on God’s first two commands to Adam and Eve: “Be fruitful and multiply.” “Multiply,” he explains, “sounds like what it says: make more humans.” This is not to say every male and female should hook up, but rather that we as a society should be concerned about the “continuation of our species.”
This command is to be taken hand in hand with the next one: “Be fruitful.” Making lots of babies isn’t the point--the point is to make lots of “good” humans. What does he mean by ‘good?’ “That,” he shrugs, “is where a lot of people disagree. I myself am not entirely sure how to describe ‘good’ humans, but I’ll try. I could say ‘love’ is the measure of a 'good' human, but even there people disagree with what ‘love’ is. I think love, however, is fundamentally about willing the best for the other, to the point of being willing to lay down your life for that person. An enduring society that produces those types of people is one that I would say is a good society, and I think people who take the ideals of Catholicism seriously and live them out as intended are the most likely to do that.”
I asked him about the abuse that the LGBTQ community has had to endure at the hands of Christians, and how the Catholic Church does not recognize same-sex marriage and calls those people sinners. I also asked about how denying abortion access to women is loving to them. He winces at this, and says this in reply: “A lot of people say and do terrible things in the name of Jesus and 'love.' The Catholic Church’s official teachings do not say we should be cruel to LGBTQ members or to women who have had or want an abortion. Unfortunately, people are people and people are often hypocrites, many without realizing it. When it comes to the LGBTQ community, the Catholic Church does not say ‘being homosexual is a sin,’ it says that homosexuality is a disordered desire. The ‘sin’ comes from acting on that desire, as the Catholic Church holds that all sexual acts should be reserved for the opposite sex as a unitive and potentially procreative act within the security of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman. This goes back to “be fruitful and multiply:” Sex is so very pleasurable because it is extremely important for reproduction, which is what all life, in general, tries to do. Since the sexual act has been shown scientifically to significantly rewire the human brain, shouldn’t we try to be as careful as we possibly can be with it and make sure it is used for its intended purpose: to make babies? That is part of the Church’s practical reasoning for why homosexual acts (and extramarital and non-unitive sex) are not to be encouraged or endorsed by the Catholic Church.
"Many Christians, unfortunately, forget the lessons of the Gospel stories of the woman about to stoned and the woman at the well: those two woman were isolated and outcast from their homes for their sexual acts; one of them was about to be killed it. What happens to these women is intended to be viewed as unloving. Jesus, however, befriends them despite them ‘objectively’ sinning. He never endorsed their behavior, but he still treated them with respect and love. Even if people today might argue those women did nothing wrong, the point of those stories is that Jesus considered them ‘sinners’ and yet he loved and befriended them anyway. That is literally what Jesus was doing in every city he went to: Spending time with the people who were considered terrible sinners, not because he agreed with their actions but because they are human and thus deserve to be loved. I think Christians today too often forget that is the core message of the Jesus' teachings: to love one another.
“As for abortion, the Catholic Church’s position on that rests upon our emphasis on the inherent dignity of human life. The Catholic Church believes human life begins at conception. Operating under that view, abortion is murder and should thus be strongly discouraged and/or condemned. Personally, I think it should still remain a decision between a woman and her doctor, as the doctor is the only one with the medical expertise necessary to accurately say when an abortion is actually necessary to save the woman’s life. That, however, is a tragedy, and it is one the Catholic Church acknowledges is an unfortunate situation of ‘abortion is necessary to save a life that would be otherwise lost.’ Doctors need the confidence and ability to make difficult decisions without fear of being punished for it. That means there is a risk of abuse and malpractice, but that is the nature of trust.”
We were running out of time before he had to get to his next class, so I asked him one last question that was on my mind: “Can the existence of God be proved?”
He chuckled at this. “Some of my colleagues will likely disagree with me on this, but I personally don’t put a lot of stock in ‘proofs for God.’ I haven’t found one that convinces me, and I believe in God. I think they do a good job of suggesting God exists, but proving He exists? I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s possible to prove God’s existence to someone who doesn’t already believe in God. I think the most we can do is show is why belief in God is not illogical—that’s the role of apologetics. But I can’t say, with absolute certainty, that I am right. That’s part of why it is faith: We might be wrong. If we are wrong, then ‘we are of all people the most pitiable.’” (I had to look this up afterward, as he made it sound like a quote. He was quoting Paul’s letter (1 Cor:15-19) talking about what it means if Christians are wrong about their faith. It seems he was applying this quote to all people of faith who are wrong.)
He gave me an example of what he means by ‘impossible to prove:’ “Think of your paper for this class. You, hopefully, are writing about something that you think is true. You are speculating at what the author meant, at how the author thought, why the author wrote the book or scene the way he or she did, or any works or events that likely influenced the work you are studying. Can you know for certain that you are correct?”
My answer: “No. But I can find evidence for it that shows I probably am.”
His reply: “Exactly. It is the same way with God. I don’t think we can prove God definitely exists the same way you can’t prove, with 100% confidence, that your paper’s thesis is correct. I think there is a lot of evidence that suggests God does exist, but I can’t prove it. Belief in God is inductive, and therefore inherently uncertain. This is how the Catholic Church also understands “Natural Law” and “Moral Law.” We can’t really prove either of them exist, we just have a lot of evidence gathered from observing the world and humanity that we think strongly suggests a natural and moral law. Apologists are the ones in charge of showing how our teachings and beliefs on these subjects are not inconsistent and intellectually bankrupt to hold.
“One last thing, to explain what I mean by ‘lots of evidence for God’s existence.’ Imagine we were to find Van Gogh’s The Starry Night out in the woods. I can’t prove that someone painted it, but I think a strong case can be made that someone did paint it. I might go so far as to argue it is obvious. That’s how I tend to view the world and the universe: one giant painting made by God by means of scientific laws and evolution.”
At this point he had to leave for his next class. He thanked me for the conversation and asked if I was still able to make it to cigars this Friday to celebrate the end of the term. I told him yes, and that I will probably have more questions and that I hope he didn’t mind if I asked him. He said he did not mind.
So that leads me to here: I have never had a conversation with a person of faith like this before. Almost every response he had appealed to an intuition that he seemed fine with not everyone sharing. He's also the first Christian I've met who says he doesn't think God can be proved and doesn't seem bothered by that. I suppose my question for you is: What should I ask him? What should he clarify?

*Update- If anyone is looking for further proof of my point look at the comment section. Some of y'all need to hit the library. 😂
*If anyone takes the time to read and would like to share, feel free to repost and accept the credit, I don't have enough karma to share anywhere else relevant and could care less. All I ask is that you repost it in full and not cherry pick the information you agree or disagree with or whatever will get the most karma. I would like to avoid exactly what I'm describing in the post below. If any claims I make turn out to be false, I'll update and eat my words.*
(I obscured celebrity and influencer names to prevent fans from seeing the post and flagging it)
I saw someone posted an interview with (O *rlando Brow *n) from the channel Real life street Stars and wanted to put out a little PSA for this community. The channel has recently been growing in subscribers because of a 2020 interview with a 90's R&B artist named (J -aguar W r:ight ), who claims to have suffered abuse of all types that she during her time in the industry, and claims she was blacklisted for fighting back. Now she claims she's been on a mission for the last 20 years to bring down the vast networks of famous sex criminals she has firsthand knowledge of. In her first two interviews she speaks pretty eloquently and drops a lot of facts about the industry. Enough to get people sucked in. You'll see in her latest interviews the lady is clearly struggling heavily with some serious mental health and rumored substance issues.
I truly have empathy for her and (O rland,o B row-n,) because they are obvious examples of the Hollywood machine chewing up celebrities, especially with mental illness, and spitting them out. Both of them have publicly struggled for years, and around 2020, were both homeless and started doing YouTube interviews with obscure content creators where they were paid next to nothing to share their traumas with their viewers and creators who use these traumas to form false narratives and clickbait video titles that either are completely false or that are buried in an 8 hour live stream containing a thirty second audio clip that was stolen and reposted from another exploitative content creator's interview. Not only is it taking money out of their pockets, but also monetizing off their trauma, stealing their content and viewers, and harming their credibility even further due to them being blatantly false or misleading the viewers into thinking their all day live stream talking about the aforementioned video and accompanied by a slideshow is the primary source. One thing I've learned is most people will believe or immediately dismiss most information without even trying to read it. If you choose to go down this rabbit hole you should definitely start with their Insta pages and check out the last couple months. Without people majorly censoring and heavily editing their content, you can tell that they are doing this intentionally to hide the fact they are exploiting trauma survivors for petty cash. If you're still not wary, start with their latest interviews they're both total shit shows. Recently with the (Di +ddy stuff and Ka;tt William ,s) interview going viral, the channel "real life street stars" has blown up. Even more so in the last couple weeks with all the K- Anon stuff attracting people to their channels. If you choose to go down the rabbit hole I just beg you to please research ANY claims from ANY content creator and find a source before sharing. A lot of the time they are spitting celebrity fan fiction juxtaposed with occasional pieces of truth and (Jagua /r Wri /ght) was pretty damn convincing until about a year ago.
A lot of people get sucked in with ( Jag !uar W !right's ) first two interviews because she clearly had them prepared for a long time and was reading from a script. Now she's just exploiting the algorithm and spamming clickbait interviews with the craziest titles possible, thus contributing to the same exploitation she claims to be fighting against. This is not to say all her claims are bullshit, both most are recycled 90s and early 2000's gossip that is new to Gen z mixed with any breaking celebrity news or gossip that is big in the media. To make her stories sound more legit she'll Forrest Gump her way into every story and leading people into believing she was a big time celebrity, but these interviews and her instragram scamming are what she's most known for. The last interview she claims to have taken a boat to Epstein Island where she rescued two young girls who were trafficked and then talks about the Dark Web, "Red Rooms," that are pretty well known to be internet myths because if they were real they'd be invite only and require blackmail to access so no one is gonna talk about it even if they do exist. It amazed how many videos popped up overnight repeating her claims as facts and spreading the virus of media manipulation. If you're still thinking, "Hey, you never know!" She also claims these snuf. f videos and videos of celebrity orgies sell for 500 million dollars, which would be enough to build a whole chain of your own red rooms or throw your own Hollywood sex parties and join the fun. I know some people will probably still be curious, but just watch her 2020 interview the rest are trash, also anything with (O r.lando B,rown) is recycled lies mixed with more lies, with a couple buzzwords he's probably required to say so they can add trending topics to their video tags and get a lascivious title.
Another recent example of blatant manipulation is all the shit with (D j A ^kademics) the past couple days. His court records have been public for months with a vivid description of him and two friends drugging and raping a girl that was obviously premeditated and not his first rodeo. He is also now being sued for defamation because he pretty much told his fans she was drunk and asking for it then regretted it later and went on to say he didn't even know she was at the house until the next morning and blamed it on his friends. Meanwhile the court documents clearly show a rap with an e kit being administered and them finding his spermicide which was the same type found in the r word kit. They also describe video evidence of his two friends doing the same thing while she was unconscious, but he screenshotted a section and posted it in his defense saying clearly she was down. There are also identical allegations to the ones made against (D-rake) stating he has a history of hitting up sixteen year olds and grooming them until they turn eighteen and repeated history of similar drug related s. crimes. It took one post on his twitter and his fans started harassing the poor girl for months. The same thing happened to the lady who was a victim of (N$icki Min _aj's) husband who was doxxed by her fans for not dropping the charges. The next day AK was acting like it was all gravy and if anything gained even more followers. This is a brilliant example of why (Dra! ke's) line about being too famous to be a predator is so stupid. Almost as stupid as blatantly defaming the woman who appears to have more the enough evidence to beat him in a civil suit. Which is almost as stupid as he pretended to be during the (e- bony kin g) livestream where he was obviously ignoring the thousands of comments mentioning anything related to sexual crimes, while talking shit on the guy who successfully blackmailed his handler even after possibly being blackmailed himself on the same stream. This stupidity can only be surpassed by the millions of fans who are still watching his content instead of the news and continue regurgitating the lies of someone so fucking stupid who is most likely a s offender. These are the same ones who automatically dismissed the rumors and instantly believed the dog in the kennel story, the same who believed his alibi, and the same people who are the reason most survivors don't come forward and choose not to accept inconvenient truths right in front of their eyes.
Interestingly enough the portal.njcourts.gov site containing A.k's full court documents were offline for hours last night and a certain sight has banned reposting it for fear of doxxing, another great way to quell any dissent amongst the the ranks. Server's crashing often happens when there is a huge influx of web traffic or a site has been a victim of a DDOS attack, which is just an artificial version of the former that uses bots instead of people. I could talk forever about how fucked things are, but this is simply the world we live in. I really want to drive home the point that in order for any movement to retain credibility, everyone needs to stop sharing any type of info unless they're from a verified, reputable source and define the difference between facts and your opinions as clearly as possible. A couple million hits on youtube, twitter memes and tiktoks, and gossip blogs with broad information being deciphered by mostly idiots don't count as credible. Most of these influencers and blogs have been bought and paid for years ago and usually are biased toward certain celebrities based on the perception of whoever's sharing or whoever pays them the most. For a while now rumors have been circulating of influencers doing shady shit in Dubai for the ultra wealthy. Lot's of ties were made to Dra .ke, but have very little supporting evidence. The blind items containing the rumors also made it so anyone could decode the clues, and as soon as these posts made it on to the Kendric kl amar the moderator crew began the "conspiracy," crackdown. It took one mention of q-anon and the majority of the community jumped ship out of fear of association because "Q-anon bad, they're all scizophrenic." Overnight theories that once had been consensus were completely dismissed after being deemed conspiratorial. A couple of days later, the were forced to place a blanket ban on anything them deem, "conspiracies," regardless of it's validity due to their inability to moderate the amount of incoming posts which are almost always spammed at least ten times a day for the next week. This is the exact thing that was done with q, anon and pizzagat, e stuff back in the day. They'd find the nuttiest people to use as an example so they could paint the whole movement in the same light, then dismissed all related information, and completely censored any discussion on most major platforms. I don't subscribe to either, but they were undeniably on to something. The problem was the disinformation campaigns and general stupidity. One was quashed almost overnight because a crazy guy shot into the front window of a pizza shop and it somehow hit their computer and obliterate their hard drive containing possible evidence. The lessons is truth in every lie and it's not hard to find if you know where to look, it's what you do with it that defines who you are as a person. Some people can't handle the truth because it conflict's with their world view and those who do usually suffer because of it. If everyone does their part though, no one would have to die a martyr in its pursuit.
I've noticed a recent pattern of influencers proliferating the spread of false information especially in relation to any sa allegations. This trend really took off when (Kat -t Will/iams's) interview went viral and helped to revitalize his career and reputation. Since then many copycats have come out of the woodworks, hoping to cash in on the trend. Some other common media suppression trends and manipulation tactics to watch out for are synthetic smear campaigns dedicated to destroying the credibility of anyone with alternative beliefs, and it's gotten exponentially worse throughout the years. A great example is all the shit (Y,e). had to deal with through the years, even prior to his antisemitic remarks and all the other famous people who spoke up about their industries and were silenced. (D av+e Chapp? elle) used to talk a lot about the tactics used to humiliate and destroy many influential black men who dared to challenge the system. Another case that's similar to Ak's is the (T/or y La^ne z and M ,egan T (hee Stallio, n) trial. If you look at the court records, it's obvious the shooting was part of a larger altercation. He still might have shot her, but she at the least totally lied her ass off about the actual story to avoid incriminating friends while ensuring they could hit him with a ten year sentence. Not long after (Me ..gan THE" E S !tallion) won three Grammy's and was voted woman of the year, then disappeared off the face of the earth until her manager sued her a couple weeks ago for having sex in front of him and threatening his job over it. There are countless other celebrities and influencers who are clearly wiling to say anything for money, and those who aren't usually have some blackmail on them. There is such an abundance of glaringly obvious disinformation campaigns in the media and most are accepted as gospel without question or are suppressed if they reveal too much, raise too many questions, or start to sway public opinion. Another very common example of this phenomena is the mass release of information that paints a positive image of the celebrity while containing the same buzzwords related to controversies they don't want popping up on anywhere near the top of Google. This keeps any relevant information limited to the most recent AI generated bullshit that plays the algorithm game the best. While doing my investigation, it was unbelievably difficult finding any relevant information from before 2020, and often had to use Duckduckgo to filter out any articles written after 2023. Even then every search engine required extremely specific search terms, which would often still provide me with the exact same results. It got so bad I considered switching to Yandex.
Recently all the things I've discussed have seemingly been kicked into overdrive, especially over the last few weeks. This leads me to believe that a lot more is going down behind the scenes than most realize. I believe the day will come soon when everyone who actively fought to dismiss peoples opinions out of ignorance will be forced to accept these truths whether they like it or not I was a victim myself last week when I shared a detailed, neutral commentary on a rap feud and was shadow banned from a popular subreddit and ignored by it's moderators. This same subreddit is currently deleting any and all information related to the subject I covered. This is why I wanted to raise awareness if this doesn't get suppressed as well. Karma requirements and shadow bans that can sometimes circumvent the use of Vpn's on all connect devices, lead me to believe Reddit as a whole may also be at least partially compromised.
Chances are the same people who promote biased garbage and obvious lies are the same ones who will scroll right past any post containing more then three sentences and the ones who spread any lie they are told without question and accept everything at face value. My personal favorites are the ones who don't read past the title and clog up the comments while obscuring valuable information because they want the spark note version. This is all by design. They are the sheep the government count on to help them consolidate their wealth and power. More and more people are waking every day though. I encourage anyone new to conspiracies to really keep all this in mind going forward, especially with the proliferation of AI powered disinformation bots that dominate your front pages and control the majority of content. If you want to fight against this and keep your freedom of speech, this is a call to arms. To anyone who values the truth, the powers that be will do anything they can to try to censor any public dissidence. Remain steady in your search for truth, and learn how to effectively help other join you in lifting the veil. Stay strong in your convictions and don't allow other's to moderate your options, your beliefs, or your truth.
Thanks for Reading
-The Original Random Moniker

Yelena watched the doorway through which the young Ashfield scion had just left for a few moments more as she pondered over the meeting they’d just had.
Precocious indeed, she thought with a smile.
A smile that only grew as her gaze flitted over to her childhood friend’s… complicated expression.
It seemed young William’s decision had come as much a surprise to his instructor as it had come to Yelena herself.
“He said no,” Joana said after a few moments.
Yelena nodded slowly as she reclined into her friend’s surprisingly comfortable chair. Given what she knew of Griffith, the Queen had half expected the thing to be harder than mithril when she first sat down - but it was surprisingly plush.
“Not without good reason,” Yelena said as she shifted about.
“Good reason?” Joana scoffed. “You offered him your daughter’s hand.” Her eyes narrowed slightly. “You offered all of your daughter’s hands.”
Yelena rolled her eyes at her friend’s tone. “And if he’d accepted I would have considered it a bargain.”
A minor scandal and the loss of a number of future marriage alliances was ultimately nothing compared to the ability to raid Kraken nests. And that was ignoring that a hypothetical means to slay kraken in deep water would undoubtedly have other applications.
Applications that would be incredibly useful in the months to come.
Though, perhaps, if young William’s plans came to fruition that coming storm could be delayed by a few years.
“…Are things truly that desperate?” Joana asked quietly.
“They’re not great,” Yelena admitted, massaging the bridge of her nose. “The Blackstones… I knew they’d resist the reforms, but to threaten open rebellion?”
She’d not expected that. Not even in her wildest dreams. Lindholm’s only human ducal house had ever been wilful, and their antipathy towards the Orcs who dwelled in the Sunlands was well documented, but surely even they could see why Yelena was doing what she was.
Regardless of what her critics said, her decision to end the slave trade in Lindholm was most assuredly not the result of ‘useless sentiment’.
Far from it.
Oh certainly, Yelena had no love for the institution of slavery, for reasons both moral and financial, but that wasn’t why she’d created the abolitionist movement.
With each passing year, the Homeland’s view of Lindholm grew ever more covetous. More and more the Sun Empress and Desert Khan’s rhetoric centred less on their ongoing deadlock with each other and more on the idea of ‘recovering wayward territories’.
Certainly, that could have been a reference to Old Growth as much as Lindholm, but Yelena doubted it.
Lindholm might have scared the Solites and Lunites into retreating by choosing to engage them over deep water, but ultimately those victories were borne of a lack of conviction on the part of her foes.
Had the two disparate fleets been willing to risk the permanent loss of a small portion of their mithril cores in order to achieve victory and push towards the mainland, they may well have been able to flip the allegiances of a number of Lindholmian houses.
Oh, certainly, the high elves and dark elves of Lindholm might have prided themselves on maintaining the strictures of equality that defined the Old Empire – but with either Solite or Lunite airships hovering over their family castles, she couldn’t help but wonder if some might reconsider their stances on their fellow elves.
No, while an invasion of Lindholm would certainly be costly, it was entirely within the realm of reason.
An invasion of the Old Growth however?
There was a reason the Wood Elves – as they named themselves – had managed to remain independent of both the other two, much larger, nations despite sharing land borders with both of them.
Their strange magics might have been muted and weak beyond the borders of their home, but within their territory they were nigh invincible.
No, if there was to be any ‘reclamation’ of any territory belonging to the old Aelven Imperium, it was likely to come from Lindholm.
To that end, the kingdom could ill afford to keep feeding people and iron into the meatgrinder that was the Sunlands. Could ill afford to keep orcs that might otherwise be valuable mages laboring in the fields under the eyes of watchful taskmasters.
Lindholm needed every mage-knight it could get – regardless of the color of their skin or the shape of their ears.
Yet after year and years of negotiations and attempts to shift public opinion on the matter, the North still remained willfully ignorant of that truth.
“Surely they know that even if they win, any kind of division between us will just see the Homeland sweep over them?” Joana said.
Yelena shrugged. “I have a feeling that Duchess Blackstone’s victories over both the Lunites and Solites has left her confident of repeating the fact should it come to that.”
Foolhardy, in her eyes, but no one had ever accused the Blackstones of being meek. Nor being incapable of backing up their sometimes insane claims. What other House could lay claim to an ancestry that had once beaten back the Old Imperium at the height of its power?
Where other human nobles had been sworn into the Old Imperium on their knees with their battered armies scattered to the winds, the Blackstones managed to resist long and hard enough that the Imperial Legions had been forced to come to the negotiating table.
Ultimately, the Blackstones had still been absorbed into the Empire, but they’d done so on their terms with their heads unbowed.
…Though it was somewhat ironic that nearly a thousand years on, it was now those same humans in the position of the old Imperial Legion while it was the free orcs who now utilized the same strategies as the old Blackstone tribes – right down to the Wyvern riders.
“I could imagine that,” Joana muttered.
“Is it strange that I think she might pull it off?” Yelena said – though only because she was sure that no one beyond her friend and silent guards was listening.
“Part of me wants to argue that, but… do you think it’s a human thing?”
Yelena thought about the Blackstones and the young man who’d just turned down a chance to be king one day.
“Perhaps,” she admitted.
Personally she thought it was because humans didn’t live as long – and there was more of them. When your life could be measured in but a single century, perhaps you were a bit more inclined towards taking risks that might make an elf balk?
…Risks like trying to take your first year team up against a third year team in the name of trying to avoid a war.
Or at least delay it.
“I still can’t believe he said no to your offer,” Joana said, something… complicated in her friend’s expression.
Yelena grinned at the sight, though she wrestled down the urge to ask a number of probing questions of her normally straight laced friend, who seemed to have a childish crush on a young man nearly ten years her junior – and her student beside.
Normally she’d be all over a scandal that delicious.
Alas, right now was work time. “I can. He gave me his reasons and they were solid.”
Well, solid enough. If you squinted a bit. And tried to think ‘human’.
Rather than all-but guarantee a war by having the Crown break off his betrothal, he intended to do it himself.
Loudly and publicly.
And if he won – and that was a big if – he’d all but destroy any kind of excuse the Blackstones might have to declare war in response. Indeed, by being ‘shamed’ in such a public manner they’d need to spend a few years at least regathering lost support.
After all, who would want to follow a house into a civil war just after their heir was publicly humiliated by a team of cadets two years her junior?
Academy fights weren’t just schoolyard squabbles. They were civil conflicts writ small. A microcosm of the constant jostling and jockeying of Lindholm’s houses.
In other words, they held weight.
If Willaim could beat his fiancée, Yelena knew she’d owe him more than she could ever truly repay. A few more years of preparation would turn an almost guaranteed defeat into something much more even.
Especially if she could scoop up who knows how many mithril cores that were otherwise just littering the ocean. Ninety percent of them would be of limited use immediately, but a few years would give her time to construct at least a few more airship hulls to house the devices.
All that was required was for William to win.
“Solid,” Joana scoffed. “His plan is to go up against a group of third years with a team of firsties.”
Yelena tried to keep the intensity she was feeling out of her tone as she leaned forward. “You don’t think he can do it?”
Joana opened her mouth before hesitating. “I… normally I’d say no. Talented as they are, the gap in experience is just too wide.”
“But…”
The dark elf rolled her silver eyes behind her glasses. “But, with William’s newest invention…” The woman paused. “Son of a bitch.”
For just a moment Yelena was treated to the rare sight of her friend laughing. “I can’t believe I thought he ‘just wanted to use it in a schoolyard fight’,” the Instructor said.
“Well, he sort of is, in a way.” Yelena shrugged. “It just so happens to be a very important schoolyard fight.”
Joana laughed. “I suppose it is.”
“Still, do you think he can win?”
Joana straightened up. “I genuinely don’t know. With his new invention he might be able to catch her off guard. If he can skew the numbers in his favor at the start, they might have a chance.”
Yelena frowned. Not exactly the ringing endorsement she wanted to hear, but that was part of why she valued Joana’s friendship.
Always had really, even when the girl had first come to court at the age of ten as a potential playmate for Yelena’s daughters and told her that her dress made her look like some kind of tropical bird.
Something Yelena realized upon closer inspection was true.
Ever since, the Queen had made a point of checking in with the girl from time to time, if only for the occasional shot of unvarnished truth.
It was a strange ‘friendship’ from the outside looking in, but one that got less so as time went by and the age gap became less stark.
“Well, let’s hope the human capacity for the nigh impossible isn’t relegated entirely to the Blackstones,” Yelena muttered.
Because if it wasn’t, the boy would either have to marry one of Yelena’s daughters or die.
She could not afford the knowledge in his head to reach the Blackstones. To that end, he’d either accept her offer – rolling the dice on the onset of war and all that might come with it – or he’d suffer an accident.
As much as it pained the royal sovereign’s heart to see such a bright and enterprising soul be snuffed out before its time.
Being forced to make such decisions was simply the price of wearing the crown.
“Still,” Joana said, and Yelena was grateful for the distraction as she looked up. “Will you actually leave him alone if he pulls this off?”
Yelena scoffed.
“Of course not. If anything I’ll up my offer.” She shrugged. “I’ll give him you, myself and half my court if it means getting my hands on what’s in his head.”
It was actually a little amusing how Joana flushed at her words, even as she shook her head.
“Yes, that sounds a lot more like you.”
Yelena nodded. Damn right it did.
Though as she did, a thought occurred to her. “Hey Joana?”
“Yes?”
“In your reports to me, didn’t you mention the Ashfield boy having some kind of nickname.”
The dark elf pondered the words for a moment before stiffening. “Hmm, he does actually. A rather apt one considering. Apt enough that I’m wondering if whatever he used to kill Al’Hundra is related.”
“Well, don’t keep me in suspense. What is it?”
Joana leaned back, her head craned upwards, as if seeking strength from above.
“Kraken Slayer.”
Yelena laughed. She couldn’t help it.
“Of course it is.”
“You killed Al’Hundra.”
William was still reeling a little from the conversation he’d just had, so he was actually a little caught off guard by a finger being shoved into his face the moment he stepped back into his teams quarters.
Ah, he thought. I promised answers.
Though it seemed that in his absence his team had managed to figure out some of those answers without him.
Glancing past Olzenya’s outstretched arm, he saw Marline shaking her head – as if to vehemently deny she’d told them anything.
She needn’t have bothered, her geass precluded it as an option. Hell, even once everyone found out it would preclude it as an option.
Which was for the best for the moment because now he wasn’t so much trying to hide what he’d done as how he’d done it. Admittedly, Marline didn’t know anything beyond the broadest details, but she knew enough to know that it was some kind of enchantment combined with alchemy.
Now it was possible the forces working against him – or rather simply to profit off him – had already figured that out and he’d hear the alchemy lab exploded any moment now, but he’d sooner put it off for as long as he could.
To that end, he turned to Olzenya – though not before politely lowering her pointing arm.
Something that, to her credit, the high elf allowed – actually looking a little embarrassed by her outburst and thus rudeness.
“Honestly, I was expecting something like that to come from Bonnlyn, not you,” he said to the slightly flushed high elf.
As he glanced over toward where the dwarf was sitting, she shrugged. “I realize I may not be the most classically polite individual around, but I’ve been a merchant long enough to recognize when someone’s got a trade secret they want to keep close to their chests.”
If anything, Olzenya flushed harder, as while she might not have been familiar with trade secrets, she was most definitely familiar with the notion of house spells that needed to be kept secret.
“I also thought ambushing him at the door was a little rude,” Verity murmured from the back of the room.
Olzenya coughed, before backing up. “Of course, I apologize for that William.”
More bemused than anything else, especially as the elf curtsied, he waved a hand dismissively. “It’s fine. Or, understandable, I guess.”
“Good,” Ozlenya smiled, glad for his acceptance… before she shouted again. “Because you lied to us.”
“I did?”
“He didn’t,” Marline said. “He said he had something to bet against Tala.”
Indeed he had, something he’d kept hidden under a sheet. After all, he’d not wanted his big surprise to be spoiled by the rumors of his coming beating him to the cafeteria.
And they would.
Rumors in the academy somehow managed to move at light speed.
“He implied it was gold,” Olzenya shot back.
“And you said Tala wouldn’t go for it, but you came with us anyway,” Bonnlyn said.
Indeed, he had implied it was gold. Or ‘something valuable enough to catch her interest’.
“To comfort him after she shot him down,” Olzenya said. “Instead I damn near tripped over my own feet in front of everyone when he pulled an honest to goddess mithril core out of his ass.”
William was actually a little thrown off – and amused – by the sudden display of crassness from the noble girl.
“But he didn’t lie.” It was actually a little surprising – and heartwarming – to hear Verity speaking so forcefully.
And that Olzenya didn’t immediately snap at her for doing so. The team really had come a long way in just a few months.
Ah, the joys of shared suffering, William thought as he watched the girls bicker amongst themselves.
“As I’m sure you’ve all guessed, I have indeed been less than open about a few things,” he said, silencing all of them – except Marline who’d yet to speak in the first place. “With that said, I’ve never once lied to you about my end goal.”
“Breaking off your betrothal,” Marline said finally.
“Breaking off my betrothal without starting a war,” he said. “If it were that easy, the Queen would have done it for me just now.”
“You met the Queen?” Olzenya sounded a little faint.
“I did.”
Oh, how he did.
“Oh ancestors, please don’t tell me you hit on the queen!?” This time Marline sounded a little faint.
And he actually felt a little offended. “What!? Why would you think that.”
“You’re doing the same thing you do when we talk about Instructor Griffith,” Bonnlyn said with studiously neutral voice. “Or Instructor Morline. Or Instructor Flen. Or some of the guards.”
“Or that one cafeteria lady,” Verity chimed in, a little red in the face.
“Or the-”
“I do not!” He’d finally had enough of these aspersion on his character.
Across the room, a number of sighs rang out, even from the elves.
“At least now I knew why he never checked me out,” Bonnlyn said. “He’s got mommy issues. And I’m not old enough to tickle them.”
“Still, the Queen?” Olzenya hissed.
“I mean, have you seen her?” Marline muttered back. “I mean, I don’t agree with him… but I get it.”
“I didn’t ‘perv’ on the Queen.” Some part of him died on using such childish language. “We had a meeting about my plans and… what occurred with Al’Hundra. Needless to say, the fact that I’m here means she’s agreed to go ahead with them and I’m also to keep quiet about anything I may or may not have had to do with any Kraken going missing. Or their cores.”
He deliberately left out the royal marriage offer.
Still, with those words the room went silent. After all, if the Queen had told him to say nothing, he was expected to say nothing. Just because the North in general didn’t have much respect for royal authority didn’t mean the rest of the kingdom did.
Quite the opposite.
“Well, if the Queen has commanded you to remain silent, I suppose there’s nothing to be done,” Olzenya muttered. “Though I would like answers some day.”
“Hell, I’d like to know why you brought Marline in on your plans,” Bonnlyn said, glancing at the Dark Elf. “You know, and not the rest of us.”
There was no missing the hint of hurt there – which he understood.
“I can promise you it was purely a matter of convenient circumstance,” he said. “And I can promise you, I didn’t confide in Marline for free.”
All the girls glanced up as the dark elf nodded slowly. “He’s not lying – though I can’t say anymore. Literally. It’s a price I paid willingly, but one I doubt any of you would be interested in.”
Almost as one, he could see the lightbulbs turn on in everyone’s brain simultaneously – except for Verity, who took a few seconds.
‘Geass,’ thought none of them said it.
This time though, when the girls looked between him and Marline, there was a definite sense of wariness to it.
“Well, I suppose there’s nothing else to say then,” Bonnyln said. “I guess we should…”
“…Go to bed,” Olzenya nodded warily.
William grinned. “Good idea. Big day tomorrow and all that.”
That was an understatement, and he could tell everyone was thinking it as they made their way over to their rooms.
Still, it was true all the same.
They’d need their rest if they wanted to stand a chance tomorrow.
Indeed, they’d need every advantage they could get.
To that end, William could only hope he’d stacked the deck in their favor enough to matter.
…It took him a long time to get to sleep.
When he did awake, in the early hours of the morning, it was to the sound of an explosion.
In the direction of the old alchemy labs if I’m not wrong, he thought with a grim smile.
It seemed someone had decided to investigate his storage room even sooner than he’d anticipated.
Annoying, but it hardly mattered at this point in time.
All that really mattered was going back to sleep.
He had a big day ahead of him, after all.
Previous / First / Next
Another three chapters are also available on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/bluefishcake
We also have a (surprisingly) active Discord where and I and a few other authors like to hang out: https://discord.gg/RctHFucHaq

Hello Apes.
Back with another review of all the tweets sent from memelord and cat inspiration, Roaring Kitty.
If you missed my first review for 13th May, you can find it here.
To reiterate, the description of each tweet is to the best of my knowledge the references made and the speculation is pure speculation on my part, this is just for fun and shouldn't be taken as any financial advice, make your own decisions, I just like the stock. If you have anything to add feel free to in the comments and I'll do my best to update the post.
11am - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790396654971224430
Description: The infamous scene from the movie Troy where Achilles rather reluctantly at first, comes forward to fight the mighty Boagrius. Achilles runs at him, defending against a few spear throws then with one epic jump and slide, stabs Boagrius with this blade killing him in one clean strike. The music dubbed on this clip is Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm of the War Drums by A Perfect Circle.
Speculation: Chosen warrior blessed by the gods comes forward in front of the masses and takes out the big baddie. You could make the speculation that the song could reference something to do with DRS (A Perfect Circle) and SHFs bleeding out (counting bodies like sheep).
11.30am - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790404203715887238
Description: First of all we have a cat talking to itself in the mirror stating the words, "Don't be the bigger person today, be the person that helps them understand that sometimes when you f**k around, we find out...". We then cut to arrested development where Buster who is portrayed as a bear has something to say, "i wanna shoot down everything you say, so i feel good about myself. cause i'm an uptight [insert copious amounts of swearing].
Speculation: First part DFV knows they (Shorts) have messed around again and have been doing it dirty. The gig is up again, time to close and pay up. The second part is a funny scene from arrested development where Buster, a character who just cannot fit in properly goes AWAL to try and show he has a nasty side, it just comes across as way too far. DFV just poking fun at bears here no doubt.
12:00pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790411757120561628
Description: First we have a scene from The Town where Doug says to James, "I need your help. I can't tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we're gonna hurt some people." and James replies, "Who's car are we going to take?" Then it cuts to Mad Max where there are a load of sand buggy cars going nuts with flame throwers and all sorts of chaos with the song Du Hast by Rammstein playing in the background.
Speculation: I haven't seen the Town but from reading online this scene showed the amazing friendship between Doug and James when James simply replies, who's car are we going to take? in response to what sounds like a risky ask for help from Doug. Then with Mad Max: Fury Road we have a film about a post apocalyptic survivor in Max Rockatansky who eventually brings down a warlords Citadel (hmmm).
12:30pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790419301976903884
Description: First we have the whistling of Omar from The Wire, then we have a scene from the Kingsmen where they are locked in a pub with Galahad and the quote "Manners maketh man" and finally we have a scene from Oldboy with a big fight scene cut alongside some anime which is from demon slayer
Speculation: The whistling is synonymous with Omar and is to the tune of a nursery rhyme, "the farmer in the dell", anyone that watched The Wire would know instantly that this means Omar is coming and this means you best get out the way as he is coming with his double-barreled shotgun and he certainly won't hesitate to use it. The Kingsmen scene where they are locked in the pub is a particularly violent scene and it's an interesting film to reference, the plot *Film spoiler here* is essentially about a boy named Eggsy from a lower-class neighbourhood who's father dies and he finds out that his father was part of an elite inner circle of upper class. After trying to be part of this group, Eggsy discovers their secret plot to take over the world and takes it into his own hands to save the day. u/ ThePhenomNoku talks about the last 2 referenced films; "So the anime is demon slayer. It’s about a kid who has everything taken from him and trains to learn how to fight demons. Though as a sidenote he kind of carries one around with him. It’s complicated.The other movie with the guy holding the person, & the fight scene is the original Oldboy, and without giving too much of the plot away it’s about a dude who is falsely imprisoned for a couple of years or so, and then enacts his revenge."
Edit\* As u/ omegs points out: whistle is "The farmer in the dell, Hi-ho, the derry-o" reference to the circle. The movie Kingsmens: The Golden Circle as well
1:00pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790426851409817615
Description: Firstly we have the scene from Oceans 11 where Danny Ocean is chatting to Rusty Ryan right in the initial stage of their plan to heist the casino. He talks about how it's never been done before, will need planning and a large crew and Ryan asks if they are going to use guns, he replies "not exactly, there's lots of security" and finally Ryan asks "what's the target?". We then cut to a film i'm not aware (anyone help here?) of where an older gentleman shows a calculator to a young woman and the calculator says "Just up" on it then the woman says "yes that looks correct"
Speculation: In Oceans 11 there was a lot of planning and variables that had to happen for everything to work. It was a high risk high reward plan with a lot set up to go against but it's possible. The target has always been "just up", DFV just reiterating what he said in the first place.
1:30pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790434400494116873
Description: First we have a scene from Old School where he states, "A loophole?" "Yes. Well, it's interesting, sir. As stupid as they appear, they're actually very good at paperwork. It's quite an anomaly." then it cuts to a scene from the same film with the C&C factory everybody dance now song and a cheerleading dance attempt
Speculation: Of course with the loophole stuff it could be about all of the DD that has been done on what has gone on over the years but it could equally be about SHFs finding loopholes to get out of the mess they are in with the stock. The second part the judges clearly don't feel the attempt of the cheerleading or gymnastics piece they are portraying is any good but they are giving it a go and it's suppose to a comedy. Note the school is the cougars, cat links again of course.
Edit\* As u/ omegs points out: Loophole is reference to circle. Notice how the mascot is similar to a cat that does backflips into the center of the circle
2:00pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790441953659687421
Description: The first part is taken from The Batman and has Batman's monologue running and when the Batman signal is fired into the sky, a kitty shadow is shown instead of the Batman logo. It ends with an emphasis on "Fear is a Tool".
Speculation: Batman was of course a good hero who would rid the streets of criminals, they would scare just at the sight of the batman signal being fired knowing that they were about to get wrecked. In this clip, two years has been replaced with three years in the monologue and the kitty signal is of course a nice touch.
2:30pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790449499506192405
Description: This clip is taken from Mr Robot and is where Elliot plays eXit, a text based computer game that requires him to answer a series of questions in a text based game.
Speculation: I think it's best just to give the description of what happens in this scene taken from the fandom page. Elliot chooses to sit down with the friend in the dungeon. He lights a match and reads the note "Don't leave me here." Elliot chooses to stay. The alarm shuts off. An explosion happens nearby. Robot opens the door to find a fire raging outside. He concludes it's too late. Both of them sit down. They each say "I love you." Explosions rage around the room. "It's an exciting time in the world," Elliot says. Fade to red. Take from that what you will.
3:00pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790457051115847720
Description: This scene is taken from the movie Scream (2022), a direct sequel to Scream 4. A lot of the text has been changed but to summarize, one person states "he is making a requel" then there is some talk about the squeeze movie that came out last year and how most people in the actual know hated it and how "squeeze mid" pissed on their "covidhood", how the main character is a mary sue? Then a few cuts of Scream and how real squeeze movies have meta slasher whodunnits and that to some people the original is their favorite thing in the world
Speculation: A requel is A movie which revisits the subject matter of an earlier film but is not a remake or a linear continuation of its plot (i.e. a sequel or prequel). So essentially what is happening right now with the stock is not exactly the same of what has happened before but it is essentially a revisit of the same subject regarding squeezes. A mid squeeze implies that it wasn't as high as the squeeze could have gone and the theme of slashers and murdered people really suggests heads will roll (SHFs hopefully).
3:30pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790464599575167004
Description: This is a scene from Candyman where he has come for the woman. There is some cat flashes and images going on and the Woman in this is tagged as a bear (that is someone who is down on a stock or market, usually would short). Candyman talks about how there is no need for the bear to leave yet and that he was obliged to come then he says "be my victim" and a bumble bee comes out of the word be.
Speculation: Time is running out for the bear, they can hang around for a while longer but they will be the victim. This is more of the DFV is coming for you as he dresses himself up as a rampaging murderer targeting the bear in this case. Not sure on the bee, whether that is DFV just having some fun or if it's that a sting is coming in some sense.
4:00pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790472153470759217
Description: Taken from No Country for Old Men, Carson states he is a day trader and that Anton doesn't have to do this (Anton is going to kill him) tell him he could just go home. Carson continues that Anton could have 14 grand out of an ATM and just walk away before finally stating "do you have any idea how crazy you are?". Anton replies, "you mean the nature of these memes?" to which Carson says "I mean the nature of you!" The scene ends with the phone ringing.
Speculation: DFV putting himself into the mode of Anton from No Country for Old Men is quite the statement. For those who haven't seen this movie, Anton is a wrecking ball of a killer and adheres by his rulebook to seek out different people through the movie to take out. Carson being the desperate short seller here who is not understanding why DFV isn't just playing by the usual financial rules and taking his gains and going. The phone ringing at end could be an implication of margin calls ringing for the desperate short seller.
Edit\* As u/ omegs points out: I think the ATM might be a double meaning "At The Money"
8:00pm - https://x.com/TheRoaringKitty/status/1790532552828289526
Description: This is taken from Braveheart and the prisoner (William Wallace) is asked to say a word in a famous scene where WW shouts "FREEEEDOM" only in this clip its "GAMESTOOOOOOOP".
Speculation: This is the first direct reference to Gamestop word for word and it should be noted that this is the scene where William Wallace is about to be executed. Could mean that DFV is willing to risk it all for Gamestop like William Wallace martyring himself for the freedom of Scotland.
Hope you enjoyed.
Love ya DFV

Just spent the last several hours writing this for myself in preparation for teaching Sunday School this upcoming Sunday. Thought I'd share it here too for anyone interested. (I didn't cite my outside sources, besides scriptures, because I was just writing these notes for myself. But it pulls from various places of research that I can point you to if interested, especially from Scripture Central.)

Mosiah 11-17: Abinadi

Abinadi has a tremendous impact on the rest of the Book of Mormon and the religious history of the Nephites and Lamanites. He converted Alma the Elder, whose personal ministry and the ministries of his descendants (Alma the Younger, Helaman, Shiblon, Corianton, Helaman II, Nephi II, Lehi, Nephi III, Timothy, Jonas, Nephi IV, Amos the Elder, Amos the Younger, Ammaron) convert 1000s to the gospel, and lead the Church all the way to the visitation of Christ to the Americas and afterwards until Mormon.
In the order it is presented (shortly after Mosiah 1-6), we see a direct parallel between:

• King Benjamin (reign ended in 130 BC) of Zarahemla as a righteous king who labored with his own hands (and not off the work of his people) and taught them in the ways of righteousness; and
• King Noah (died sometime between 145-122 BC) of Shilom as a wicked king who exploited labor and wealth from his people and taught them wickedness.

Mormon, when abridging the Record of Zeniff, frames the story of King Noah of Shilom and Abinadi specifically as a parallel to Pharaoh of Egypt (another wicked king) and Moses.

Mosiah 11:1-19

Pharaoh & Moses	Noah & Abinadi
Pharaoh, as a new king, moves away from the traditions of his father (Ex. 1:8)	King Noah does not walk in the ways of his father (Mosiah 11:1-2)
Pharaoh subjects the Jews (Ex. 1:13-14)	King Noah subjects his people (Mosiah 11:1-15)
Pharaoh installs wise men and sorcerers (Ex. 7:11)	King Noah installs wicked priests (Mosiah 11:5)

Note that the emphasis of "one fifth part" in v. 3 is repeated five times: an instance of "thematic repetition", a Hebraism that is meant to emphasize a specific theme. In this case, it emphasizes the heaviness of the burden placed on the people that this 20% net worth tax represented.
According to the Law of Moses, there was only supposed to be one high priest (Leviticus 21:10). However, v. 11 says that Noah had consecrated "high priests"; he was abusing and corrupting the Law of Moses for his benefit and the benefit of his friends.

Mosiah 11:20-25

Abinadi, "a man among them" (someone who lived among them), then comes forth to prophesy and preach against the people. He has clearly, with direction from the Lord, prepared a specific statement that is supposed to preached. This preparation is evident in its chiasmic form:

• A. Behold, thus saith the Lord, and thus hath he commanded me, saying, Go forth, and say unto this people, thus saith the Lord—Wo be unto this people,
  • B. for I have seen their abominations, and their wickedness, and their whoredoms;
    • C. and except they repent I will visit them in mine anger.
    • C. Yea, and it shall come to pass that when they shall cry unto me I will be slow to hear their cries; yea, and I will suffer them that they be smitten by their enemies. And except they repent in sackcloth and ashes, and cry mightily to the Lord their God,
  • B. I will not hear their prayers, neither will I deliver them out of their afflictions;
• A. and thus saith the Lord, and thus hath he commanded me.

The beginning and end of his message are also filled with prophetic speech forms common throughout the Old Testament and recognized by those familiar with Hebrew culture or descending from Hebrew culture (like the people of Shilom):

• "Thus saith the Lord" (Messenger Form)
• "Thus hath he commanded me, saying" (Revelation Form)
• "Go forth, and say unto this people, thus saith the Lord" (Messenger Form)
• "Wo be unto this people" (Woe Oracle)

After this initial message is delivered, we then see more parallels (purposely framed by the abridger, Mormon) between Moses and Abinadi:

Pharaoh & Moses	Noah & Abinadi
Moses initially flees for his life since Pharaoh seeks to slay him (Ex. 2:15)	Abinadi initially escapes when the people and King Noah seek to slay him (Ex. Mosiah 11:26,28)
Pharaoh rejects the Lord's authority, saying, "Who is the Lord..." (Ex. 5:2)	King Noah rejects the Lord's authority, saying, "Who is the Lord..."
Pharaoh hardens his heart (Ex. 7:13, JST)	King Noah hardens his heart (Mosiah 11:29)
Moses is commanded by the Lord to return from exile and preach to Pharaoh (Ex. 7:1-2)	Abinadi is commanded to return from exile and preach to the people (Mosiah 12:1)

Mosiah 12:1-17

After two years, Abinadi returns to the city by commandment of the Lord to preach unto the people. There is a possibility that he returned to preach specifically at the celebration of Pentecost. The Pentecost was, prior to the New Testament, a Jewish yearly celebration of the giving of the Ten Commandments to Moses and the chidlren of Israel. Such a gathering would have given Abinadi an audience for his preaching, and its themes align with the themes of Abinadi's message (as we will see).
We start by illustrating more parallels between Moses and Abinadi:

Pharaoh & Moses	Noah & Abinadi
Upon returning to Pharoah, Moses prophesies of and delivers a series of plagues (including famine, pestilence, hail, fire, insects) unless Pharaoh repents (Ex. 7-10)	Upon returning to Shilom, Abinadi prophesies of a series of plagues (including famine, pestilence, hail, fire, insects) unless the people repent (Mosiah 12:1-8)
Because of the afflictions, Pharoah will eventually acknowledge the Lord (Ex. 7:5,17)	Because of the afflictions, King Noah will eventually acknowledge the Lord (Mosiah 12:3)
Moses challenges the wise men and sorcerers of Pharaoh (Ex. 7:8-12)	Abinadi challenges the wicked priests of King Noah (Mosiah 12:25-29)

Again, this language is filled with strong prophetic speech forms, this time a Hebraism known as the "simile curse". For example, "the life of king Noah shall be valued even as a garment in a hot furnace" (v. 3).

Mosiah 12:18 - 13:26

Just as Moses challenged the power, knowledge, and authority of the wise men and sorcerers of Pharaoh, Abinadi directly challenges the power, knowledge, and authority of the wicked priests of King Noah.
The ordeal is started when, after being imprisoned for his prophecies against the people, the priests of King Noah tell the king to bring Abinadi before him so that they may question him. Their questioning starts by quoting Isaiah 52:7-10 to Abinadi, and asking him what those words mean:
"How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings; that publisheth peace; that bringeth good tidings of good; that publisheth salvation; that saith unto Zion, Thy God reigneth;
Thy watchmen shall lift up the voice; with the voice together shall they sing; for they shall see eye to eye when the Lord shall bring again Zion;
Break forth into joy; sing together ye waste places of Jerusalem; for the Lord hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem;
The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations, and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God?"
Why these words? The people of Zeniff (the generation before the people of King Noah) left the land of Zarahemla to return back up to the land of Nephi – Shilom was in the mountains and hills, as compared to where they had lived before. In essence, these wicked priests were saying, "Why are you preaching that we are a wicked people when the scriptures call our feet beautiful? We are preaching good tidings unto the people – we teach them the law of Moses. Why all of this doom-and-gloom that you preach? You are clearly in the wrong for calling us to repentance."
Abinadi then begins his challenge: "Are you priests, and pretend to teach this people, and to understand the spirit of prophesying, and yet desire to know of me what these things mean?" (12:25). This then becomes the theme of his challenge to them: the priests do not understand the scriptures, especially the Law of Moses, and Abinadi is going to explain the scriptures and the law of Moses to them.
He asks them, "What teach ye this people?" (12:27).
They answer, "The Law of Moses" (12:28). Again, Moses and the law given to him are a theme of this interaction between Abinadi and the priests of King Noah. In total, the name "Moses" is used 16 times from Mosiah 12:28-16:15, 15 of which are by Abinadi and 1 of which is by the abridger, Mormon.
Abinadi replies, "If ye teach the law of Moses, why do ye not keep it?" (12:29) and then proceeds to list their sins, especially pride, wealth-seeking, sexual immorality, and leading the people astray.
Abinadi then challenges them again: "And what know ye concerning the law of Moses? Doth salvation come by the law of Moses? What say ye?" (12:31).
The priests respond that salvation does come by the law of Moses.
Abinadi then says, "I know if ye keep the commandments of God ye shall be saved; yea, if ye keep the commandments which the Lord delivered unto Moses in the mount of Sinai, saying..." (12:33) and then quotes two of the Ten Commandments. If Abinadi came at the time of Pentecost, then this is the exact occasion these people are celebrating: the time when the Lord delivered unto Moses the commandments at Sinai. Thus, Abinadi would be referencing the festival, in essence, saying, "Don't you remember the whole point of this party you are throwing right now? You are forgetting why we have this festival in the first place."
The king then, being angry with Abinadi, tells his priests to slay Abinadi, but Abinadi withstands them, saying, "Touch me not, for God shall smite you if ye lay your hands upon me, for I have not delivered the message which the Lord sent me to deliver; neither have I told you that which ye requested that I should tell [referring to the requested interpretation of Isaiah 52:7-10]; therefore, God will not suffer that I shall be destroyed at this time" (13:3).
Then, Mormon records that "the people of king Noah durst not lay their hands on [Abinadi], for the Spirit of the Lord was upon him; and his face shone with exceeding luster, even as Moses' did while in the mount of Sinai, while speaking with the Lord" (13:5). (Again, this is a powerful and divine reference to the events being celebrated at the Pentecost festival. Now, it isn't just Abinadi or Mormon drawing the parallels to Moses: God Himself, by resting that light upon Abinadi, is writing the parallel.)
And with power and authority, he then reads to them "the remainder of the [ten] commandments of God". The Ten Commandments "are not written in [the priests'] hearts", because instead of studying and teaching the scriptures as they ought to have been, they "have studied and taught iniquity the most part of [their] lives" (13:11).
Once more, we see more parallels between Moses and Abinadi:

Pharaoh & Moses	Noah & Abinadi
Moses' face shines when he came down from Sinai with the two tables of testimony from the Lord for the people of Israel (Ex. 34:29-30)	Abinadi's face shines as he delivers his message to King Noah and his priests (Mosiah 13:5)
The people of Israel are afraid to approach Moses because his face shines (Ex. 34:30)	The priests of King Noah are afraid to lay their hands on him because of his words and because his face shines (Mosiah 13:5)
Moses delivers the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20, 34)	Abinadi delivers the Ten Commandments (Mosiah 12:35-36, 13:12-24)
Moses speaks to a stiff-necked people (Ex. 32:9)	Abinadi speaks to a stiff-necked people (Mosiah 13:29)

Abinadi finishes delivering the Ten Commandments by saying, "Have ye taught this people that they should observe to do all these things for to keep these commandments? I say unto you, Nay" (13:25-26).

Mosiah 13:27-35

Abinadi then starts to lay the seeds that connect the law of Moses (and perhaps the Pentecost festival) and the passages from Isaiah he was asked about earlier. After reciting to them the Law of Moses, he reminds the priests of their earlier statement that salvation comes by the law of Moses:
"And now ye have said that salvation cometh by the law of Moses [part of which he just read to them]; I say unto you that it is expedient that ye should keep the law of Moses as yet; but I say unto you that the time shall come when it shall no more be expedient to keep the law of Moses.
And moreover, I say unto you, that salvation doth not come by the law alone; and were it not for the atonement which God himself shall make for the sins and iniquities of his people that they must unavoidably perish, notwithstanding the law of Moses" (13:27-28)
In addition to the Ten Commandments, the Law of Moses required a series of strict ordinances, rituals, and observances that had to be kept strictly. One of these was the atonement sacrifice: a person would present a sacrificial animal, one without blemish, to be killed; the animal symbolically took the sins of the person and was killed on their behalf, reconciling the individual back to Jehovah. The person made an atonement sacrifice.
Therefore, Abinadi is saying that this strict law means nothing, unless God Himself offers an atoning sacrifice, something that is so great it will cover the sins of all his people, not just one person and not just for one sin but for all sins.
In Abinadi's words, the law of Moses and all its ordinances "were types of things to come" (13:31): they were a symbol pointing forward to the great atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
He then says that the children of Israel and the Jews in Jerusalem did also not understand the law "and this because of the hardness of their hearts" (13:32), implying that the priests of King Noah also do not understand the Law of Moses.
"For behold, did not Moses prophecy unto them concerning the coming of the Messiah, and that God should redeem his people? Yea, and even all the prophets who have prophesied ever since the world began–have they not spoken more or less concerning these things?
Have they not said that God himself should come down amng the children of men, and take upon him the form of man, and go forth in mighty power upon the face of the earth?
Yea, and have they not said also that he should bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, and that he, himself, should be oppressed and afflicted?" (13:33-35).

Mosiah 14 - 15:31

Now Abinadi starts to turn back more directly to answer the previous question posed by the priests concerning the meaning of Isaiah 52:7-10. Of course, what is a great technique for understanding a passage? You look at its context. So, what does Abinadi do to explain the meaning of Isaiah 52? He recites to them the content of Isaiah 53, a Messianic prophecy:
"Yea, even doth not Isaiah say: Who hath believed our report, and to whom is the arm of the Lord revealed?
For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of dry ground; he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him.
He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
All we, like sheep, have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquities of us all.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb so he opened not his mouth.
He was taken from prison and from judgment; and who shall declare his generation? For he was cut off out of the land of the living; for the transgressions of my people was he stricken.
And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no evil, neither was any deceit in his mouth.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him; he hath put him to grief; when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
He shall see the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied; by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death; and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bore the sins of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." (Mosiah 14)
He then, in beautiful language, explains Isaiah 53 by:

• expounding on the relationship between the Father and the Son (15:1-5);
• explaining that the Son will be, as Isaiah said, oppressed and afflicted (15:5) and led "as a sheep before the shearer is dumb so he opened not his mouth" (15:6) and slain (15:7) so that death and iniquity may be defeated.

He then, echoing the words of Isaiah in Chapter 53, asks, "Who shall declare his generation?" and answers his own question and, simultaneously, the priests' question concerning Isaiah 52:
"All the holy prophets who have prophesied concerning the coming of the Lord... all those who have hearkened unto their words, and beleived that the Lord would redeem his people, and have looked forward to that day for a remission of their sins... the prophets, every one that has opened his mouth to prophesy, that has not fallen into transgression, I mean all the holy prophets ever since the world began...
These are they who have published peace, who have brought good tidings of good, who have published salvation; and said unto Zion: Thy God reigneth!
And O how beautiful upon the mountains were their feet!
And again, how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those that are still publishing peace!
And again, how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who shall hereafter publish peace, yea, from this time henceforth and forever!
And behold, I say unto you, this is not all. For O how beautiful upon the mountains are **the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that is the founder of peace, yea, even the Lord, who has redeemed his people; yea, him who has granted salvation unto his people" (Mosiah 15:11-18).
In other words, Abinadi is refuting their interpretation of Isaiah 52: these verses aren't about them; they are about Christ and all those who preach and follow Christ.
He then expounds on what "the salvation of our God" (Isaiah 52:10) actually is: that Christ "has broken the bands of death" (Mosiah 15:23) and "all those that have believed in [the words of the prophets], or all those that have kept the commandments of God, shall come forth in the first resurrection" (Mosiah 15:22).
But, salvation does not come to those "that rebel against him and die in their sins", those "that have wilfully rebelled against God, that have known the commandments of God, and would not keep them; these are they that have no part int the first resurrection" (15:26); in other words, the exact type of people that King Noah and his priests are: people who know the law and who should know better. This is why Abinadi then challenges them and says, "Therefore ought ye not to tremble?" because they know, as he does, that they are wilfully rebelling against God.
Then, to tie it all back together, he connects his words to Isaiah 52:8-10:
"...the time shall come that the salvation of the Lord shall be declared to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people.
Yea, Lord, thy watchmen shall lift up their voice; with the voice together shall they sing; for they shall see eye to eye, when the Lord shall bring again Zion.
Break forth into joy, sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem; for the Lord hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem.
The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God." (Mosiah 15:28-31)

Mosiah 16:1-15

After quoting to them again the words of Isaiah 52, he repeats the last idea of Isaiah's words to them:
"The time shall come when all shall see the salvation of the Lord; when every nation, kindred, tongue, and people shall see eye to eye and shall confess before God that his judgments are just." (16:2)
He then expounds upon the state of the wicked after death, teaches the Fall of Adam and Eve, and the necessity of the Redemption and Resurrection of Christ; that is, he concludes his challenge and sermon to the priests by teaching them the Plan of Salvation.
A defining feature of this sermon is that Abinadi speaks "of things to come as though they had already come" (16:6); that is, he speaks in the present or past tense about future events (e.g., the redemption, the resurrection, etc.). This is another powerful Hebraic prophetic speech form, known as the "prophetic perfect tense"; it is used by many Old Testament prophets when they speak of future events. Why? Because having received revelation concerning those events, their faith and knowledge of such events is as plain as if it already has happened to them. To them, Jesus might as well have already come, that is how real His Atonement is to them. That aspect of the future is just as matter of fact as the present or past.
Finally, Abinadi ties it all back together to the big theme: the priests do not understand, teach, or live according to the Law of Moses, and unless they repent, they will not be saved by the redemption of Christ.
"And now, ought ye not to tremble and repent of your sins, and remember that only in and through Christ ye can be saved?
Therefore, if ye teach the law of Moses, also teach that it is a shadow of those things which are to come–
Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father. Amen." (16:13-15)

Mosiah 17:1-20

Abinadi's sermon has a lasting impact on one of the high priests, Alma, who believes Abinadi's words and pleads with the king to not be angry with Abinadi and let him depart in peace. (Again, the impact of Abinadi's sermon cannot be understated: Alma becomes the righteous leader of the Church, authorized with the priesthood to perform ordinances and set apart other leaders in the Church. His descendants are consistently those that lead the Nephites in the ways of the Lord until and after the coming of Christ.)
King Noah casts out Alma, who flees so that he will not be slain. It is because of Alma that we have this record of Abinadi at all, as he is the one who "did write all the words which Abinadi had spoken" (17:4).
King Noah then casts Abinadi into prison (seeing as how he had finished his message) for three days. (Notably, the length of the Pentecost Festival is also three days.)
After counseling with his priests, King Noah has Abinadi brought before them to stand trial. The priests have found a way, under the Law of Moses, to condemn Abinadi to death: they accuse him of blasphemy, which, under the Law of Moses, is punishable by death (Leviticus 24:11-16).
"Abinadi, we have found an accusation against thee, and thou art worthy of death. For thou hast said that God himself should come down among the children of men; and now, for this cause thou shalt be put to death unless thou wilt recall all the words which thou hast spoken evil concerning me and my people." (17:7-8)
Notice that the condition of Abinadi's acquittal is not that he repeal the words he said about God; the priests don't actually care about that trumped up charge. They instead care about the curses he has placed on them and prophesied of them, that they will be scourged, and plagued, and burned, etc. The ancient people took curses very seriously, and if Abinadi had the power to place a curse, only he could repeal it.
He refutes them once more: "I will not recall the words which I have spoken unto you, concerning this people, for they are true; and that ye may know of their surety I have suffered myself that I have fallen into your hands. Yea, and I will suffer even until death, and I will not recall my words, and they shall stand as a testimony against you. And if ye slay me ye will shed innocent blood, and this shall also stand as a testimony against you at the last day" (17:9-10).
This strikes fear into the heart of King Noah. He knows that the charges of blasphemy are false, and that if he goes through with this, it will be murder, "for he feared that the judgments of God would come upon him" (17:11).
However, the priests then quickly come up with another charge: "He has reviled the king" (17:12). This is the charge they will put him to death for, for speaking ill of the king. And King Noah acquiesces, is stirred up in anger against Abinadi and orders him to be killed.
The priests then take Abinadi, bind him, scourge him with faggots (bundles of wood to be burned), and scorch him with fire. Notice here, once more, the references to the story of Moses: because Abinadi preached to them using the Law of Moses, and shone like Moses, and spoke of Moses to testify of their iniquities, (and all possibly during the Pentecost celebration) they place him in a burning bush.
As the flames scorch him, Abinadi solidifies the curse and prophesies that, just as he is killed, so will the king die too: "And in that day ye shall be hunted, and ye shall be taken by the hand of your enemies, and then ye shall suffer, as I suffer, the pains of death by fire" (17:18). This prophesy later comes true, as King Noah is hunted and burned "unto death by fire" (Mosiah 19:20). This represents the final comparison between Moses' story and Abinadi's story:

Pharaoh & Moses	Noah & Abinadi
Just as Pharaoh had the sons of the Hebrews cast into the river to drown (Ex. 1:22), he and his army drowned in the depths of the Red Sea (Ex. 14:27-8).	Just as King Noah burned Abinadi alive (Mosiah 17:14-20), he was killed through death by fire (Mosiah 19:20).

Abinadi then exclaims, "O God, receive my soul," and dies, "because he would not deny the commandments of God, having sealed the truth of his words by his death" (Mosiah 17:20).

Abinadi: A Type and Shadow himself of Christ

Abinadi preached that the Law of Moses was a type and shadow of Christ. It's not hard to see that Abinadi's own death was also a type and shadow of Christ:

Abinadi's death	Christ's death
Abinadi testified to the wicked high priests of Shilom of their iniquities.	Christ testified to the wicked priests of the Jews of their iniqiuities.
Abinadi is placed on trial and accused of blasphemy for preaching that God would come down among the children of men.	Christ is placed on trial and accused of blapshemy for preaching that He is God, and He came down among the children of men.
Abinadi is almost released by King Noah, out of fear of the consequences.	Christ is almost released by Pilate, out of fear of the consequences.
The priests convinced King Noah to kill him anyways.	The people (and priests in particular) convinced Pilate to deliver Christ to be killed.
Abinadi is scourged and beaten prior to his death.	Christ is scourged and beaten prior to his death.
Abinadi seals the truth of his words by his death.	Christ seals the truth of his words by his death (Hebrews 9:16-17).

Welcome back to a little more MARRIED Mary Mania before I wrap things up with The Abridged Goblinization. I decided that this bit deserved its own chapter. Some of you seem to be entertained by Mary (or at least entertained by your own loathing of her), so I hope this will prove amusing. In my life, I've encountered an inordinate number of low-key lolcows (probably because I was far too patient and far too passive for far too long), so I might as well throw just enough distortion on the page to protect the good guys and the genuinely reformed beards. But I'm also gonna shine a bright, unflattering spotlight on the lolcows, creeps, weirdos, pervs, and BEARDS, both neck and leg.
And I'll very, very cautiously tiptoe over the bit where I do a bunch of mental gymnastics, squint my eyes, tilt my head, and convince myself that dating Whisky might be a welcome change of pace. I have no delusions when I look back on it. This was a dumb move in retrospect, but all the mental gymnastics in the world can't bring me to a reasonable scenario where I was psychic and thus able to predict what he'd become once he stopped pretending to be a gentleman. Nor can the most elite, Olympic-level mental gymnastics execute a double salto layout with a half-twist perfectly enough to force me to concede the "logical point" that I should have spotted warning signs that I'd never freakin' seen before. Okay, that's enough saltiness for today. Don't worry. This chapter mostly focuses on Mary's mania. Whisky's just kind of... there.
So there I was... dating a guy who called when he said he would, remained constant in his affections, never asked for weird stuff in the sack (in fact, we weren't even intimate at that point), and claimed to be a secular humanist who practiced elements of Hinduism (as opposed to conveniently becoming born-again whenever it suited his needs to wallow in shame). And we seemed to have similar enough tastes in media, which made for pleasant movie nights and enjoyable conversations about nerdy stuff. It felt like a step up. It felt safe. At that point in time, I was content.
But here's a shameful admission for ya. My original intention was to make Whisky the "for now guy." I knew I could do better. I was formally educated, I was in shape, I was normatively attractive, and I tended to be successful in both my theatrical and academic endeavors. Plus, I was super friendly and good with people. Whisky was kind of a bump on a log. Sure, he seemed nice. He was sometimes able to make interesting conversation. But my overall sentiment regarding the relationship was, to quote Whisky's favorite catch phrase, "Meh."
I knew he was mooching off his mysterious "big bro," and he wasn't doing this with the intention of saving up and eventually becoming self-sufficient. He just kicked up a fuss whenever he wanted something, and... it usually appeared. I still thought he was physically unattractive, too. I hate nasty-ass beards, I have a strong preference for shorter guys (they don't need to be as short as Dennis, but I don't exactly love being towered over), and Whisky had whatever the dude version of resting bitch face is. I admonished myself for being shallow and decided to soldier on. Date after date. And I did kind of get used to all the shallow things I objected to.
But, really... Dating Whisky at all was a dick move on my part. Then again, how many Nice Guy (TM)s want girls to do exactly what I did? Not attracted? Think he's kind of a bum? Find him a bit boring? Just give him a chance!!! Go on a crap-ton of dates with him until you like the familiarity enough to settle for him. That's the key to a healthy relationship!!! It never works. You could flip this around and apply it to Nice Girls who want pity dates, too.
Anyway. Lucy knew I was dating Whisky, and she thought it was great. She was honestly just happy to see that I was no longer pining over Dennis and that Whisky was no longer getting relentlessly stalked by Mary. Speaking of Mary... She'd had an imaginary dramatic breakup with Scumbanger not long after she crashed Lucy's brunch. Murky aside... The following summer, I'd do another show with the pervy pest and I'd find out that Mary had given the former Rum Tum Tugger a tug in the parking lot of The Imp and had let him motorboat her. When dozens of lewd messaged filled his inbox the following day, the most indiscriminate playboy I'd ever met in my freakin' life blocked that clingy legbeard's number and never had any further contact with her. But seeing as neither of them are especially reliable sources, my best guess is that the truth is somewhere in between.
After the dramatic "breakup" with Scumbanger, Mary immediately became obsessed with the new tech guy (and his wife). They allegedly had something of a throuple situation going on, but no one ever witnessed any hard evidence of this. And then Mary and Tech Guy's wife allegedly had a catfight in the middle of the fancy restaurant where the three spent their date nights. Mary did have a shiner and a scraped knee for a few weeks, and she intimated to me that Chuckie was actually the one responsible for her looking a little rough...
I believed her because there was something very different about her demeanor when she told me this. When she was in larger groups, she just screeched about how she thought the catfight was foreplay until Tech Guy ghosted her. Yet again, we'll never know the truth. But I err on the side of belief when someone tells me that DV is going on in their home, even if I generally regard that person as a delusional pathological liar. Plus, Mary had never badmouthed Chuckie before and she never made excuses for her philandering. She just felt entitled to any ding-dong she desired. Bottom line, I think there was an unfortunate incident, and I urged her to report it. She didn't; but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
And, yes. I think we're allowed to show compassion for Mary if Chuckie did indeed do what she was accusing him of. She absolutely deserved to get dumped in a spectacular fashion. No one deserves violence, though. But I think we're also allowed to laugh at Mary when she's acting like a crank-crazed maniac.
Moving on to lighter topics! Mary claimed to be having a hot, steamy affair with the artistic director of The Imp. At first, this seemed outlandish. But he had been the one to hire her. And he repeatedly refused to replace her when she consistently failed to learned her lines, ran around naked, and contributed little more than mukbangs to the comedy (again, I personally found it funny when she did that, but I was in the minority).
Some skullduggery was definitely afoot. Was it "sexy time," as Mary enthusiastically claimed? Who knows. Chuckie might have been paying the dude to give Mary a hobby. But not long after Mary started boasting about boning the artistic director, he suddenly began calling her out on her unprofessional behavior. They "broke up," but Mary managed to avoid getting kicked out of the improv troupe, bragging that she could sue the director for sexual harassment if he fired her.
And then... there was the pièce de résistance of Mary's misadventures in mating. She met a biker dude at Filthy McNasty's. This guys was disgusting. Most of her previous dudes had been questionable, weird, or possibly imaginary. But we all saw this one. He was as fat as a Hutt, he smelled like a grease trap, motor oil, B.O., and a very specific type of cheese... The few teeth that he had were black and green, his fingernails were yellowed and a few of them oozed pus. Finally, the volume and crackly, bubbly properties of his frequent farts indicated to George Gay that he, "definitely had a virgin booty." Mary's lard-ass loverboy called himself "Hogg," which was probably a reference to the two-wheeled vehicle that he was very obviously too large to actually ride. Or it might have just been an obvious nickname for a filthy fat fuck.
But Hogg, like Tech Guy a few loverboys ago, had a wife. And she made frequent appearances at Filthy's as well. Hogg's wife was shockingly... kind of pretty. A little rough around the edges. Didn't smell the greatest. But she stood in stark contrast to her repugnant hubby, even with her fried hair, her sloppily inked tats, and her imprecisely applied eye makeup. Her teeth were free of obvious rot. She had a beautiful figure. And she had a carefree attitude that was probably attractive to a number of people. She'd fart right along with Hogg, she didn't shave her legs, and the profane compound nouns she came up with always cracked me up (lard-tard, smegma-booger, felch-belcher).
And Mary was once again claiming to be in a throuple with The Hoggs. But this time, there was hard evidence. They'd get busy in some corner of the establishment, and even got booted from the dive bar a few times for lewd behavior, offensive odors, and illegal drug use. On one particular night, Mrs. Hogg lit one of her hubby's gargantuan ass-rippers while Mary was doing her thing, completely shrouded by his big belly. The blue flame ignited some spilt booze on the dingy floor, and a small fire erupted. The staff were able to stomp it out, but the nasty throuple was unceremoniously banished.
Alas, management allowed Mary to re-enter the bar because she apparently had some sort of sway with one of the bartenders. Instead of meeting her...uh... "partners" for some more boom-boom, Mary decided to come back inside and gush about Hogg's majestic rooster to all of us. She smelled like D cheese, ammonia, and burnt farts as she plopped down at our table, already screeching about how much bigger her "new boo" was, compared to that vile turd of an artistic director.
George Gay: Fuck me, Mary!!! You reek. Go wash the uncircumcised methhead off your hands and then you can sit with us.
Mary started to protest. Lucy cut her off. "Your whole body is probably a veritable Petri dish from fooling around with those nasty-ass people." She handed Mary some Purell. "Was the junkie junk off, keep the bottle, and don't you fucking touch me when you come back!"
Mary's bottom lip began to quiver and she looked pleadingly at me. "Just wash up," I told her. "You're too pretty to go around smelling like that.”
Off she went to the dingy bathroom. Maybe I wasn't harsh enough, but flattery got results in this instance. And when she returned, she had managed to dilute the stench enough so that we could stand to sit at the same table with her.
Mary took a deep breath in preparation to gush about something that would have undoubtedly been disgusting, but George cut her off this time. "Mare. How do you even BANG someone with a belly like that?"
Mary (speaking a bit more quickly than usual): Oh, it just takes some creative positioning. We get him to lie down. If Mrs. Hogg is taking in the rod, I hold his bowl of jelly up with both arms and stick my cooter in his face. He eats it like his mommy made it! And when it's my turn to get blasted, the missus uses a bunch of yoga straps to hold it up. I have to take it from behind because my own little tiny bit of va-jiggle-jaggle bumps up against his bowl of jelly if why try to smash like vanilla people. It's so much fun, though!!! And then he props his bowl of jelly up on the coffee table and plays with himself while he watches his honey strap on a dil...
George: I so regret asking.
Mary: They're sooo fun to fool around with! I think they might be my forever partners! (Her hands were too shaky to slide down her body in unbridled ecstasy, so she clasped them together and hid them underneath her itty bitty little gunt.)
Lucy: So when are you gonna dump Chuck?
Mary: Well... Hogg and the missus don't have much scratch. And what they do have, they spend on smokeables. When I meet a real sugar daddy, I'll get rid of Chuckle. He pretended to be a baller before we got married. But he's just middle management and he's content to stay there. Pffffftt. No ambition.
Mary launched into another long, unnecessarily graphic gushing about her garbage partners and their nasty-ass boom-boom. So I decided this would be a good time to clear my conscience about dating Whisky. Mary hadn't so much as mentioned him in months. She was inexplicably smitten with The Hoggs. And her ultimate dream man was obviously some filthy rich dude (perhaps a literally filthy dude who was also rich), which took Whisky out of the running. I still think it would have been amusing if Mary had tried to date Mori...
I waited for her adult film star gasp to wind down before I finally interjected, "Wow. Sounds like you've got a fantastic sex life right now!"
Mary: I do! You need to get over that born-again weirdo and find a real man so that you and I can have good girl talk!
Me: Well... I'm not banging anybody, but I am dating somebody. Sort of. It's not really that big of a deal. I'm not even sure that I'm completely into him. But he's been super sweet to me...
Lucy put her arm around me, almost as if she knew I was about to need protection.
Mary: TELL ME!
I hesitated. "Well... It's Whiskers."
In an instant, George jumped up and grabbed Mary by the shoulders, lest she lunge at me.
But Mary got very quiet. Silent tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She gasped and buried her face in her hands, now emitting one seemingly endless, impossibly high-pitched whine.
George loosened his grip and began to pat her on the back. Lucy's grip tightened on me and she whispered, "Here we go. Overreaction sequence has commenced."
Mary lifted her red, tear-stained face and glared at me. "HOW COULD YOU???"
Me: Mary, I swear. I thought you hated his guts. I haven't heard you talk about him in ages. When he asked, I thought it would be good for me to give him a chance since he's always been really sweet to me.
Mary: But what about the way he treated ME??? He was such an asshole!
Lucy: Was he? Mary, you stalked the guy. If he was rude, it was only because you weren't taking NO for an answer.
Mary: He never told me he wanted to end things. He just kept ghosting me. But whenever I showed up at his house and jumped on him, we always wound up smashing. Eventually.
I didn't have the gumption at that point in my life to suggest to Mary that it's wrong on every imaginable level to coerce someone into intimate activity, regardless of gender. And even knowing what Whiskers would eventually become, he didn't deserve THAT. I should have called her out. Instead I tried to steer the conversation back to her current bedroom bliss and try to get her to resume thinking the disgusting thoughts that delighted her so much.
Me: Who cares what he's doing now?! Aren't you insanely happy with your fun new lovers???
Mary: NO! THEY STINK! HE'S FAT. I want my sexy Whisky-Boo Whiskers back!!! Give him back, Valley! Puh-leeee-eeee-eeeee-eeeease.
Me: I don't "have" him. I'm just seeing him. If he hurt you this much, why don't you try to sit down and have a real conversation with him? It might be good for both of you to clear the air.
Mary: He blocked me on everythi-iiiiiii-iiiii-iiiiiing. Waaaaaaaaaah!
Me: Well, I guess that's your answer. You probably overwhelmed him. He seems like a bit of a softy. Personally, I need a softy right now. But I think you need a manly man.
Mary rose. She gave me an icy stare. And then she cooed in an unnervingly sweet tone. "I love you, Valley-Boo. I know you didn't mean to break my heart."
Me: Thank you, Mary. Really, I wouldn't have even considered his initial invitation if you hadn't been calling him "Satan," and telling us all that you hated him, and dating all these new guys. I didn't do it to spite you, I swear. It just happened.
Mary (still creepily, icily sweet): Yes. We're so alike, you and I. It's perfectly understandable that the same guy would go for both of us. But you owe me. You owe me big.
Me: I'm gonna disagree with that. If you think I slighted you, just tell me to fuck off. If you really do understand that these things happen, then you'll accept that there was no malice on anyone's part.
Mary: Mmmm-hmmmm. We'll see about that.
She jiggled her Jupiters, tossed her hair, and stalked out of the dive bar...

AND THEN SHE BANGED DENNIS.

Social Media and smartphones are warping how we see the real world and our reality is losing nuance rapidly.
Take the man or bear debate as a recent example. The whole premise is unhelpful and based on a glaring falsehood. It's like a 13-year-old's first essay on a topic they know next to nothing about. I'm pretty sure actual survivors of sexual abuse don't give a single damn about this "dilemma". They have real issues to deal with that those of us who are engaging in this discourse have the privilege of not having to deal with. All this fad is doing is spread the paranoid notion that there are male predators waiting around every other corner. How is that helping survivors of abuse with real trauma and fears that they carry with them in public places on a daily basis? It is absolutely not a show of solidarity to those who have actually suffered, yet people do genuinely believe they are "raising awareness", or "taking a stand".
I mean it's a far-less improbable yet ironic scenario to imagine someone walking the dim city streets at night alone with their necks bent square over their smartphones, going round corners oblivious to their surroundings while texting "I'll take the bear lol". Those same people will say they're afraid to walk alone at night and they yeard for the bear. I made that scenario up, but I've literally seen people bumping into walls and into other people in a smart phone-induced trance and just continuing like nothing happened and I've also seen people gleefully (not ruefully) opt for "the bear". What I mean is a lot of people are claiming to be terrified when they're not.
Like with the Tik-tok trend that's been dangerously telling people they have "high-functioning anxiety" without professional diagnoses, where if everyone is mentally ill then no one is mentally ill¹, it also stands to reason that if everyone is afraid, then no one is afraid. It's a dangerous way of "showing solidarity" to let pervade through society. I'm no Jordan Peterson fan, but this is a good example of the dangers of fake solidarity*. It's not just fake; it's damaging.
The whole bear vs man thing just seems to polarise people into two camps who perceive the other either as man-haters or rape-apologists. But you know what? it's not even close to being real and does absolutely nothing to bring people of differing views any closer to understanding each other. I also 100% guarantee you that those who "choose the bear" don't actually practise what they preach in their lives to even the slightest degree. One example I witnessed was at a recent social occasion where a female high school teacher whom I know quite well told her boyfriend and father to ask her if she was alone in the woods, what she would prefer... Before she even said the words "bear", or "man", I knew where where we were heading and intuitively knew what her answer was going to be.
It wasn't a debate from the very beginning. It was more like a joke - a weird joke about sexual assault told in the first person. Before she'd even got to her supposedly mind-blowing punchline (which was, in case you're a bit late to this party, "I'd choose the bear because the bear won't rape me!"), everyone seemed to know what it was going to be. Given the expectant grin on her face when she said these impactful words, It didn't turn out to be the “gotcha” she thought it was going to be. This was quite an awkward experience. I can only guess that the "gotcha" aimed at the men in the room was supposed to educate them to be ashamed to be male on the spot. It didn’t. I explained why I thought the whole thing was flawed and I was informed I needed to lighten up. I was definitely mistaken in thinking that it was a chance to talk philosophy (is it ever these days?), but perpetuating the idea that "male rapists are everywhere" while simultaneously trivialising real suffering of abuse goes completely unchecked because when we engage in this form of discourse we reduce ourselves to vacuous, infantile creatures who ironically think they're acting like fully-developed adults. Rape is light-hearted; yet - and this is where the cognitive disonance gets really odd - you're either standing up for it or you're standing up against it, but no matter what side you're on, it's funny. Instead of thinking, "why is she grinning?!", we're thinking, "what side am I on and how can I also somehow make it funny?". When in reality, it's surface-level shock-value statements with zero nuance that we allow to insincerely represent us (the wide-grinning rape denouncer doesn't practise what she preaches: she isn't a raging man-hater; she's a decent person, but for some reason, she's adopted an inane comic-strip view on something as serious as rape - and incredibly, it's all in the defence of victims!).
And this way of engaging in discourse is everywhere. On Reddit, Facebook, Twitter etc., the finger-pointing and artificial coralling of all of us into fake dualities of misogynist vs virgin-for-life simp, misandrist vs patriachy-enabler, racist vs communist and many others are rife and it's finding its way into real-life discourse at the dinner table, the classroom and the office.
If we artificially and insincerely self-separate into these 1s and 0s, are we making it easier for the A.I. on our devices to "understand" us, classify us, manipulate us and ultimately annihilate us?
OK, maybe I went too far there, but is this jarring lack of nuance really the only way we want to "talk about" serious topics now? Is it only going to get worse? I feel like it wasn't long ago you could have real discussions about issues, but this art is dying - and rapidly. You can probably sense my frustration at how society is organising itself right now and I'd love to know if anyone has any suggestions on what we can do to encourage healthy conversations and debate with each other. Maybe I'm the problem. I used to be surrounded by people who took part in stimulating, nuanced debate and now I'm not. We used to tolerate different viewpoints and we didn't confront and "block" each other on a hair-trigger. Maybe I'm old and the kids are actually all right. Let me know.
¹ ~https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5MCw8446gs&ab_channel=TheNewYorkTimes~
*I couldn't find a good quote for this, but similarly, he terms it "narcissistic compassion"

Over the course of the past few months I have been working on compiling a list of my 500 favorite songs. It was sort of challenge that I gave myself and I'm super pumped with how it turned out. There were a few rules (only 5 songs per artist being the big rule, among a few others), and here's the list I came up with. Thought it was fun, so wanted to share here and see if it might spark any discussion about song placement, lack of songs/artists, or see if anyone had any similar lists. All thoughts are welcome! (and if you don't care to comb through all 500 songs for your favorite song or artist I'm more than happy to help you track 'em down)

1. Trash Panda - Aging out of the 20th Century
   
2. Djo - Roddy
   
3. The Beatles - Don't Let Me Down
   
4. Snail Mail - Heat Wave
   
5. Phoebe Bridgers - Savior Complex
   
6. Joji - SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK
   
7. The Shins - The Fear
   
8. Talking Heads - This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)
   
9. The Cranberries - Linger
   
10. Post Animal - Ralphie
    
11. Hop Along - Not Abel
    
12. The Beach Boys - Heroes And Villains
    
13. Electric Light Orchestra - Livin' Thing
    
14. The Monkees - As We Go Along
    
15. Blondie - Heart Of Glass
    
16. The Strokes - Oblivius
    
17. Chet Baker - It's Always You
    
18. The Beatles - Rain
    
19. Electric Light Orchestra - Telephone Line
    
20. Husbands - Must Be a Cop
    
21. Faces - Ooh La La
    
22. The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??
    
23. Frank Ocean - Nights
    
24. Harry James - It's Been a Long, Long Time
    
25. The Turtles - Happy Together
    
26. Etta James - At Last
    
27. The Zombies - The Way I Feel Inside
    
28. The Beatles - Here, There And Everywhere
    
29. The Beach Boys - God Only Knows
    
30. Kanye West - Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1
    
31. Briston Maroney - Sinkin'
    
32. John Lennon - Oh My Love
    
33. Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass - Ladyfingers
    
34. Squirrel Flower - Headlights
    
35. The Backseat Lovers - Maple Syrup
    
36. The B-52's - Rock Lobster
    
37. George Harrison - All Things Must Pass
    
38. Snail Mail - Ben Franklin
    
39. Laura Elliott - Grass Stains
    
40. Djo - Chateau (Feel Alright)
    
41. Tame Impala - Eventually
    
42. The Backseat Lovers - Snowbank Blues
    
43. Claude Debussy - Clair de Lune
    
44. The Weeknd - Save Your Tears
    
45. Talking Heads - Thank You for Sending Me an Angel
    
46. The Zombies - Time of the Season
    
47. The War On Drugs - Nothing to Find
    
48. Queen - Brighton Rock
    
49. The Dream Academy - Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want
    
50. The B-52's - Strobe Light
    
51. The Cranberries - Dreams
    
52. Fugees - Killing Me Softly With His Song
    
53. Molchat Doma - Тоска
    
54. Tyler, The Creator - ARE WE STILL FRIENDS?
    
55. The Mamas & The Papas - Dream A Little Dream Of Me
    
56. The Chords - Sh-Boom
    
57. The Beatles - The Abbey Road Medley
    
58. The Ronettes - Be My Baby
    
59. The Who - Baba O'Riley
    
60. Dr. Dog - Where'd All the Time Go?
    
61. M83 - My Tears Are Becoming A Sea
    
62. Billie Eilish - everything i wanted
    
63. Outkast - Hey Ya!
    
64. Nat King Cole - Orange Colored Sky
    
65. The Notorious B.I.G. - Hypnotize
    
66. Four Tops - Reach Out I'll Be There
    
67. Foreign Air - Shut Up and Show Me
    
68. Leonard Cohen - So Long, Marianne
    
69. dodie - If I'm Being Honest
    
70. Briston Maroney - June
    
71. Post Malone - Sunflower
    
72. John Lennon - Isolation
    
73. Buddy Holly & The Crickets - Not Fade Away
    
74. Phoebe Bridgers - I Know The End
    
75. Kanye West - All Falls Down
    
76. Alvvays - Adult Diversion
    
77. John Lennon - Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy)
    
78. Clairo - Amoeba
    
79. The Beach Boys - I Know There's An Answer
    
80. Paul McCartney - Let Me Roll It
    
81. Frank Ocean - Ivy
    
82. Radiohead - Motion Picture Soundtrack
    
83. Djo - Mutual Future (Repeat)
    
84. Phoebe Bridgers - Scott Street
    
85. Childish Gambino - Me and Your Mama
    
86. Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine
    
87. The Pied Pipers - Dream
    
88. The Beach Boys - All I Wanna Do
    
89. Djo - Change
    
90. Второй этаж поражает - Крайности
    
91. Little Richard - Lucille
    
92. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Shanghai
    
93. Chet Baker - Deep In A Dream
    
94. The Beatles - It's All Too Much
    
95. Post Animal - Dirtpicker
    
96. The B-52's - Love Shack
    
97. EDEN - foreve/over
    
98. Kanye West - Ultralight Beam
    
99. The Zombies - Going Out Of My Head
    
100. Talking Heads - Found a Job
     
101. Snail Mail - Pristine
     
102. Tom Tom Club - Genius of Love
     
103. Tears For Fears - Everybody Wants To Rule The World
     
104. WILLIS - I Think I Like When It Rains
     
105. Chet Baker - But Not For Me
     
106. Naked Eyes - Always Something There to Remind Me
     
107. Tyler, The Creator - GONE, GONE / THANK YOU
     
108. Djo - Half Life
     
109. Trash Panda - Check Please
     
110. Briston Maroney - Deep Sea Diver
     
111. Beach Fossils - This Year
     
112. Momma - Medicine
     
113. Hop Along - Prior Things
     
114. Talking Heads - Road to Nowhere
     
115. Electric Light Orchestra - Turn to Stone
     
116. Briston Maroney - It's Not My Fault
     
117. Tyler, The Creator - NEW MAGIC WAND
     
118. Snail Mail - Headlock
     
119. Phil Collins - Take Me Home
     
120. Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know
     
121. The Beach Boys - Do It Again
     
122. Tame Impala - Breathe Deeper
     
123. Ella Fitzgerald - Misty
     
124. Phoebe Bridgers - Waiting Room
     
125. Kanye West - Runaway
     
126. Daft Punk - Get Lucky (feat. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers)
     
127. Dire Straits - Money for Nothing
     
128. Kendrick Lamar - Alright
     
129. Black Country, New Road - Concorde
     
130. George Harrison - If Not for You
     
131. Harry Styles - Cherry
     
132. Ms. Lauryn Hill - Doo Wop (That Thing)
     
133. Paul McCartney - Junk
     
134. Wings - Maybe I'm Amazed [Live]
     
135. Talking Heads - Houses in Motion
     
136. Del Water Gap - Ode to a Conversation Stuck in Your Throat
     
137. Pixies - Where Is My Mind?
     
138. Queen - Seven Seas Of Rhye
     
139. Paul McCartney - Jet
     
140. Sufjan Stevens - Death with Dignity
     
141. A Flock Of Seagulls - I Ran (So Far Away)
     
142. Tame Impala - Let It Happen
     
143. Led Zeppelin - Whole Lotta Love
     
144. Clairo - Management
     
145. Tommy James & The Shondells - I Think We're Alone Now
     
146. Fergie - Clumsy
     
147. Childish Gambino - This Is America
     
148. Prefab Sprout - The King of Rock 'N' Roll
     
149. Joy Again - Looking Out for You
     
150. Beach House - Space Song
     
151. John Lennon - Mind Games
     
152. The Weeknd - Gasoline
     
153. Weezer - Buddy Holly
     
154. Phoebe Bridgers - Sidelines
     
155. Tame Impala - New Person, Same Old Mistakes
     
156. Lana Del Rey - A&W
     
157. The Dillards - I've Just Seen a Face
     
158. The Doors - Break on Through (To the Other Side)
     
159. Julie London - I'm Glad There Is You
     
160. 2Pac - California Love
     
161. Dean Martin - Everybody Loves Somebody
     
162. Snail Mail - Anytime
     
163. The Strokes - The Adults Are Talking
     
164. Jordana, TV Girl - Better in the Dark
     
165. Juice WRLD - Hide (feat. Seezyn)
     
166. The Wild Reeds - Get Better
     
167. Finom - Mine
     
168. Hop Along - One That Suits Me
     
169. The Killers - Mr. Brightside
     
170. Michael Cera - Clay Pigeons
     
171. Clairo - Bags
     
172. Prince - Let's Go Crazy
     
173. The Zombies - She's Not There
     
174. Blackstreet - No Diggity
     
175. Frank Sinatra - I've Got You Under My Skin
     
176. John Denver - Take Me Home, Country Roads
     
177. Harry James - I'm Beginning to See The Light
     
178. The Clash - London Calling
     
179. Charles Bradley - Changes
     
180. Buddy Holly - (Ummmm, Oh Yeah) Dearest
     
181. Eagles - Seven Bridges Road [Live]
     
182. Moxie - Honey
     
183. Faces - Stay with Me
     
184. Post Animal - How Do You Feel
     
185. New Order - Age of Consent
     
186. Natalie Imbruglia - Torn
     
187. Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time
     
188. Twin Peaks - Blue Coupe
     
189. Kanye West - Gold Digger
     
190. Fruit Bats - The Bottom of It
     
191. Frank Sinatra - Somethin' Stupid
     
192. Lorde - Perfect Places
     
193. Martha Tilton - Exactly Like You
     
194. King Crimson - 21st Century Schizoid Man
     
195. Glen Campbell - Southern Nights
     
196. Claire Rosinkranz - Frankenstein
     
197. Guillemots - Made-Up Lovesong #43
     
198. Fleetwood Mac - Say You Love Me
     
199. Frankie Valli - Can't Take My Eyes off You
     
200. The Crickets - Don't Ever Change
     
201. Paul Anka - Put Your Head On My Shoulder
     
202. George Harrison - Isn't It a Pity
     
203. Trash Panda - Off
     
204. Super Besse - Holod
     
205. Beyoncé - Hold Up
     
206. Charlie Burg - I Don't Wanna Be Okay Without You
     
207. Eagles - Peaceful Easy Feeling
     
208. Ella Fitzgerald - It's A Lovely Day Today
     
209. PERMSKY KRAY - Дорогой Человек
     
210. The Little Dippers - Forever
     
211. The B-52's - There's a Moon in the Sky (Called the Moon)
     
212. Patti Page - Old Cape Cod
     
213. Daft Punk - Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger
     
214. The Soggy Bottom Boys - I Am A Man Of Constant Sorrow
     
215. Trash Panda - Things Will Never Change
     
216. Hop Along - Well-dressed
     
217. Sixpence None The Richer - Kiss Me
     
218. TV Girl - Daughter of a Cop
     
219. LAUNDRY DAY - Jane
     
220. Tyler, The Creator - EARFQUAKE
     
221. Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11
     
222. Joji - Gimme Love
     
223. The Backseat Lovers - Pool House
     
224. The Weeknd - Take My Breath
     
225. Mild High Club - Homage
     
226. Doc Watson - Am I Born to Die?
     
227. Daniel Caesar - Streetcar
     
228. The Kinks - Sunny Afternoon
     
229. John Lennon - #9 Dream
     
230. Tame Impala - Elephant
     
231. Chuck Berry - You Never Can Tell
     
232. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
     
233. KIDS SEE GHOSTS - 4th Dimension
     
234. Soft Cell - Tainted Love
     
235. The B-52's - Song for a Future Generation
     
236. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
     
237. Lana Del Rey - Blue Jeans
     
238. Billie Eilish - Halley's Comet
     
239. Glenn Miller - In the Mood
     
240. Kid Bloom - Control
     
241. The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build A Home
     
242. Marvin Gaye - I Heard It Through The Grapevine
     
243. Brenda Lee - If You Love Me (Really Love Me)
     
244. TV Girl - Lovers Rock
     
245. Art Lown - Knew You Well
     
246. Dean Martin - Ain't That A Kick In The Head
     
247. Miniature Tigers - Like or Like Like
     
248. Electric Light Orchestra - Sweet Talkin' Woman
     
249. The Hunts - Ages
     
250. The Cars - Good Times Roll
     
251. Bill Withers - Lovely Day
     
252. Drake - God's Plan
     
253. Kansas - Point of Know Return
     
254. The Neighbourhood - Stargazing
     
255. The Clash - Rock the Casbah
     
256. Hop Along - What the Writer Meant
     
257. Briston Maroney - Under My Skin
     
258. Jack Stauber - Buttercup
     
259. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Ya Love
     
260. Ginger Root - Loretta
     
261. Thompson Twins - Hold Me Now
     
262. Frank Ocean - Pyramids
     
263. Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God)
     
264. Destroy Boys - I Threw Glass at My Friend's Eyes and Now I'm on Probation
     
265. Mild High Club - Dionysian State
     
266. Franz Ferdinand - Take Me Out
     
267. Kevin Abstract - Empty
     
268. The Frights - Crust Bucket
     
269. Stealers Wheel - Stuck In The Middle With You
     
270. The Shins - Fighting in a Sack
     
271. fun. - We Are Young (feat. Janelle Monáe)
     
272. Lil Uzi Vert - Money Longer
     
273. Miniature Tigers - Cannibal Queen
     
274. The Doors - Touch Me
     
275. Jean Dawson - Clear Bones
     
276. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Catching Smoke
     
277. Molchat Doma - Люди Надоели
     
278. The Go-Go's - Our Lips Are Sealed
     
279. Billie Eilish - ocean eyes
     
280. BOYO - Crown
     
281. The 1975 - Somebody Else
     
282. Husbands - She's a Betty
     
283. Syd Barrett - If It's In You
     
284. Trash Panda - Atlanta Girls
     
285. Frank Ocean - Godspeed
     
286. Alice Phoebe Lou - Glow
     
287. Childish Gambino - Redbone
     
288. New Order - Blue Monday
     
289. Post Animal - Schedule
     
290. Harry Styles - Fine Line
     
291. Harry James - I'll Get By (As Long As I Have You)
     
292. Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again
     
293. Chet Baker - I Fall In Love Too Easily
     
294. The Cranberries - Put Me Down
     
295. John Mayer - Edge of Desire
     
296. George Harrison - All Those Years Ago
     
297. Electric Light Orchestra - The Diary of Horace Wimp
     
298. Alex Clare - Too Close
     
299. Eric B. & Rakim - Know The Ledge
     
300. Peter Frampton - Show Me The Way [Live]
     
301. Simon & Garfunkel - Mrs. Robinson
     
302. Black Eyes - Deformative
     
303. The Righteous Brothers - Unchained Melody
     
304. Bonny Light Horseman - Deep In Love
     
305. The Walker Brothers - The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore
     
306. Cage The Elephant - Cigarette Daydreams
     
307. Hot Flash Heat Wave - Raindrop
     
308. Clairo - Sofia
     
309. Kendrick Lamar - PRIDE.
     
310. Camille Saint-Saëns - The Swan
     
311. Weezer - Say It Ain't So
     
312. C418 - Sweden
     
313. Lana Del Rey - Let The Light In (feat. Father John Misty)
     
314. The Postal Service - Such Great Heights
     
315. Pickin' On Series - Those to Come
     
316. Lana Del Rey - Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he's deep-sea fishing (feat. RIOPY)
     
317. John Mayer - Moving On and Getting Over
     
318. Field Medic - POWERFUL LOVE
     
319. Cage The Elephant - Flow
     
320. Joji - Run
     
321. The Who - Won't Get Fooled Again
     
322. Boston - Peace of Mind
     
323. Ben E. King - This Magic Moment
     
324. David Bowie - Starman
     
325. Beastie Boys - Sabotage
     
326. Harry Belafonte - Banana Boat (Day-O)
     
327. Gene Krupa & His Orchestra - Rhumboogie
     
328. The Cardigans - Lovefool
     
329. The Kinks - You Really Got Me
     
330. The Zombies - She's Coming Home
     
331. Michael Jackson - Thriller
     
332. Moxie - Blue Skies
     
333. The Mamas & The Papas - Straight Shooter
     
334. Peter, Paul and Mary - Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
     
335. Green Day - Brain Stew
     
336. Dua Lipa - Levitating (feat. DaBaby)
     
337. The Police - Roxanne
     
338. Britney Spears - Toxic
     
339. Tears For Fears - Head Over Heels
     
340. Rex Orange County - Pluto Projector
     
341. The Strokes - Call It Fate, Call It Karma
     
342. Portugal. The Man - Feel It Still
     
343. The Black Crowes - Twice As Hard
     
344. Ted Nugent - Stranglehold
     
345. fun. - Some Nights
     
346. Wings - Silly Love Songs
     
347. Paramore - Still into You
     
348. Peter Frampton - Baby, I Love Your Way [Live]
     
349. The Monkees - Last Train to Clarksville
     
350. Royel Otis - Oysters In My Pocket
     
351. The Backseat Lovers - Growing/Dying
     
352. Nelly Furtado - Say It Right
     
353. Post Animal - Goggles
     
354. Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No. 1
     
355. Childish Gambino - IV. Sweatpants
     
356. Steely Dan - Dirty Work
     
357. ABBA - Lay All Your Love On Me
     
358. Still Woozy - Goodie Bag
     
359. Arlo Parks - Black Dog
     
360. Goth Babe - Weekend Friend
     
361. George & the Handsomes - Sleepy Beats
     
362. boygenius - 20
     
363. The Mills Brothers - You Always Hurt The One You Love
     
364. Travis Scott - SICKO MODE
     
365. Pinegrove - Need 2
     
366. The Backseat Lovers - Sinking Ship
     
367. Franz Schubert - Ave Maria
     
368. Zac Brown Band - Knee Deep (feat. Jimmy Buffett)
     
369. Justin Timberlake - Mirrors
     
370. Simon & Garfunkel - Cecilia
     
371. The Cranberries - Zombie
     
372. Daniel Caesar - Japanese Denim
     
373. Billie Holiday - Easy Living
     
374. ISLAND - By Your Side
     
375. Phil Collins - Tomorrow Never Knows
     
376. Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin'
     
377. The Four Freshmen - Day By Day
     
378. Fleetwood Mac - The Chain
     
379. Billy Joel - Big Shot
     
380. Billie Eilish - Happier Than Ever
     
381. Yot Club - down bad
     
382. Rihanna - Stay
     
383. Fleetwood Mac - Landslide
     
384. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake, Op. 20, Act 2: No. 10, Scene. Moderato
     
385. The White Stripes - Fell In Love With a Girl
     
386. Alvvays - Easy On Your Own?
     
387. Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - If We Were Vampires
     
388. Blackway - What's Up Danger (with Black Caviar)
     
389. Albert Hammond - It Never Rains in Southern California
     
390. Matt Maltese - Jupiter
     
391. John Denver - Mother Nature's Son
     
392. Childish Gambino - Sober
     
393. Claire Rosinkranz - Pools and Palm Trees
     
394. The Cars - Just What I Needed
     
395. The Doors - Light My Fire
     
396. Blondie - Tomorrow Never Knows
     
397. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Hell's Itch
     
398. The Japanese House - Saw You In A Dream
     
399. Franz Schubert - String Quartet No. 13 in A Minor, Op. 29 No. 1, D. 804
     
400. The Drifters - White Christmas
     
401. The 1975 - Robbers
     
402. George Harrison - Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
     
403. The Frights - Tongues
     
404. Paramore - Ain't It Fun
     
405. Billy Joel - Pressure
     
406. Frank Sinatra - My Way
     
407. Art Lown - Going Back to Carolina
     
408. Bruno Mars - Just the Way You Are
     
409. Under The Rug - Lonesome & Mad
     
410. The Mamas & The Papas - Dedicated To The One I Love
     
411. Foster The People - Sit Next to Me
     
412. Weezer - Undone - The Sweater Song
     
413. Michael Jackson - Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'
     
414. Tia Blake - Plastic Jesus
     
415. Los Bravos - Bring a Little Lovin'
     
416. Lady Gaga - Bad Romance
     
417. Minnie Riperton - Les Fleurs
     
418. Billy Idol - Dancing with Myself
     
419. Cody Fry - I Hear a Symphony
     
420. Gringo Sapiens - Driver's Licence
     
421. Vacations - Relax
     
422. Glitter Party - time waits
     
423. Steve Lacy - Bad Habit
     
424. The Crystals - Then He Kissed Me
     
425. The Pied Pipers - Mairzy Doats
     
426. Mitski - Bug Like an Angel
     
427. James Ray - I've Got My Mind Set On You
     
428. Clairo - Bubble Gum
     
429. Masayoshi Takanaka - SEXY DANCE
     
430. Nat King Cole - (I Love You) For Sentimental Reasons
     
431. Sleigh Bells - Crown On the Ground
     
432. Olivia Rodrigo - favorite crime
     
433. No Doubt - Just A Girl
     
434. Foreigner - Long, Long Way from Home
     
435. Heart - Crazy On You
     
436. The Hunts - Darlin'
     
437. David Bowie - Heroes
     
438. Alice Phoebe Lou - Hammer
     
439. Thee Oh Sees - Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster
     
440. Roar - I Can't Handle Change
     
441. TV Girl - Birds Dont Sing
     
442. Laufey - From The Start
     
443. Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group - Freight Train (feat. Nancy Whiskey)
     
444. Metro Boomin - Am I Dreaming
     
445. Liana Flores - rises the moon
     
446. POP ETC - Speak Up
     
447. Jean Knight - Mr. Big Stuff
     
448. The Platters - Twilight Time
     
449. Derek & The Dominos - Layla
     
450. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Homeless Man in Adidas
     
451. Charlie Burg - Lovesong (The Way)
     
452. Hot Flash Heat Wave - Gutter Girl
     
453. ABBA - Fernando
     
454. Mitski - My Love Mine All Mine
     
455. Savannah Conley - More Than Fine
     
456. Young the Giant - Mind Over Matter
     
457. Future Crib - Yer Movin'
     
458. Bob Dylan - Like a Rolling Stone
     
459. benches - Violent
     
460. Musical Youth - Pass The Dutchie
     
461. Olivia Rodrigo - vampire
     
462. Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone - City Of Stars
     
463. Maya Hawke - Thérèse
     
464. Current Joys - A Different Age
     
465. Wayne Newton - Danke Schoen
     
466. La Roux - Bulletproof
     
467. Jason Segel, Walter - Man Or Muppet
     
468. U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
     
469. The Raconteurs - Steady, As She Goes
     
470. The Ink Spots - Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall
     
471. Ace of Base - The Sign
     
472. Vulfpeck - 1612
     
473. Nordista Freeze - Hey GiGi
     
474. The Chainsmokers - New York City
     
475. Suki Waterhouse - Johanna
     
476. Pete Rodriguez - I Like It Like That
     
477. Calvin Harris - Summer
     
478. The Rare Occasions - Notion
     
479. a-ha - Take on Me
     
480. Rush - Working Man
     
481. Traffic - Dear Mr. Fantasy
     
482. Starbuck - Moonlight Feels Right
     
483. Van Halen - Drop Dead Legs
     
484. The Troggs - Wild Thing
     
485. Led Zeppelin - Good Times Bad Times
     
486. The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)
     
487. Cream - Sunshine Of Your Love
     
488. Justin Timberlake - SexyBack (feat. Timbaland)
     
489. David Bowie - Suffragette City
     
490. Ludwig van Beethoven - Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 2 "Moonlight"
     
491. Avicii - Wake Me Up
     
492. The Who - La-La-La-Lies
     
493. The Spinners - The Rubberband Man
     
494. MGMT - Time to Pretend
     
495. Hootie & The Blowfish - Only Wanna Be With You
     
496. Sheck Wes - Mo Bamba
     
497. Claire Rosinkranz - 123
     
498. Ringo Starr - Photograph
     
499. The Proclaimers - I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)
     
500. Duran Duran - Rio
     

3.4. Mahishasaka or Sarvāstivādis

[wisdomlib.org:] [Mahishasaka had the doctrines] similar to those of the Mahasanghika. [Mahishasaka] denied reality to past and future, but maintained the reality of the present. Similarly, the school rejected the doctrine of the void and the non ego, the production of taint by the Five consciousness, the theory of nine kinds of non activity, and so on. They held that enlightenment came suddenly rathern than gradually.

Mahasamghika split from the Sthaviravāda (Theravada or Dhamma-Vinaya) and produced many schools.

According to the Theravādin Dīpavaṃsa, the Sarvāstivādins emerged from the older Mahīśāsaka school, but the Śāriputraparipṛcchā and the Samayabhedoparacanacakra state that the Mahīśāsaka emerged from the Sarvāstivāda. [Sarvastivada (wiki)]

Some Vajjian monks, who were possibly the followers of Devadatta, established the Mahasamghika after the schism after rejecting ten Vinaya rules. Like a few other monks, a Vajjian monk complained about the Vinaya rules. The story is recorded in Vajjiputta Sutta, which was utilised to support an argument that the Dhamma-Vinaya tradition added new rules. Indeed, the Buddha, the founder of the Dhamma-Vinaya Sasana, added new rules as required. However, before His passing He let the monks remove the minor rules, but the monks kept all the 227 rules. Only some Vajjian monks once again attempted to remove ten rules and split the Sangha after their attempt failed. These rebel monks founded many schools that united into Mahayana. The Sarvāstivādis wrote many famous Mahayanist scriptures.

Gandhāran Mahīśāsakas are associated with the Pure Land teachings of Amitābha Buddha. [Seated Buddha Amitabha statue.jpg (wiki)]

• Mādhyamika Also known as: Śūnyavāda, Shunyavada, Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Sarvastivada Also known as: Sarvastivadin, Vaibhashika, Encyclopaedia Britannica

Mahāsaṅghikās revised the Dhamma and Vinaya in their own way. The revised collections were known as Ācariyavāda as distinguished from the Theravāda of the First Buddhist Council. Dīpavaṃsa says, that the Mahāsaṅghikās did not stop after changing the Vinaya rules. They went further by laying down for themselves new doctrines contrary to the established ones. They recited for their purposes the sūtras and Vinaya, they made alterations in the texts and their arrangements and interpretations.
There are four kinds of teachings, that can be accepted as the Buddha's words – sutta, suttānuloma, ācariyavāda, attanomati. In Parinibbāna Sutta there are other four kinds of teaching – Buddhāpadesa, Saṅghāpadesa, Sambahulattherāpadesa, Ekattherāpadesa. They are not contradicting each other.
They also replaced portions of the text by others according to their liking and even rejected certain parts of the canon though they have been accepted according to the tradition of Mahā Kassapa's council. They refused Parivāra and Abhidhamma Pakaraṇa, Paṭisambhidā, Niddesa and Jātaka.
Mahāsaṅghikās divided their canon into five parts: 1. Sūtra, 2. Vinaya, 3. Abhidhamma, 4. Miscellaneous, 5. Dhāranīs. [ Notes from BPU Sri Lanka - Third Year ]

According to Sibani Barman in Dipavamsa (study): Chapter 2d - The Third Buddhist Council,

the Vibhajjavādins claim that their theories and Canon are same as the original Sthaviras (the elders).

• But that statement is untruthful. Kaccānagotta Sutta is a living proof. This is explained in 3.3.

Sarvāstivādis Doctrines

[David Bastow. The first argument for Sarvastivada. Asian Philosophy Vol. 5 No. 2 Oct.1995 Pp.109-125 Copyright by Asian Philosophy]

[Bastow:] The argument is two-fold: that past states of mind can be directly perceived; and that the temporal and causal context of these states of mind, including their karmic future and the possibility of an alternative saving future, can also be directly perceived.

In demonstrating their belief, the Sarvāstivādis attacked, the Venerable Maugdalyayana in the Maugdalyayana-skandhaka, the first chapter of the Vijnanakaya (200 BCE?):

[Bastow:] The sramana Maugdalyayana says: The past and the future do not exist; the present and the unconditioned (asainskrta) exist.

• Atacked: Singled out a thera, ignored the Buddha, and attacked the Dhamma;
• The Venerable Maugdalyayana represents the Sakyamuni Buddha.
• The past is memory, not the present dhamma. The past as memory is perceived, not lived nor imagined. The past as perceived is not lived, but it was lived, so it can be perceived.
• The future is yet to be lived, so it cannot be perceived, but it can be planned, expected and imagined.

[Bastow:] Section 1: [The Sarvāstivādis argued based on] probably Anguttara Nikaya III section 69 (i.e. A i 201-3). "There are three akusala-mulani (roots of ill, roots leading to bad consequences). These are lobha, greed; dvesa, anger; and moha, confusion." From this agreed premise the argument proceeds, first taking the case of lobha. There is no doubt then that there has been, is, will be a seeing that lobha is akusala (otherwise translated: a seeing of akusala--presumably meaning akusala-dharmas--in or through lobha). The lobha that is thus seen--is it past, present or future? If it is past or future, then it must be admitted that past or future exist. So could it be present?

• Lobha (greed) which existed in the past does not exist now, nor will exist in the future. When the object that caused that state of mind dimished, that greed also dimished. For example, one ate a certain food with greed. After eating it, greed was replaced by another state of mind, sleepiness, which was about sleeping and delusion. Sleepiness is different from craving for food. One does not get sleepy for food.
• If the same greed were to exist until now, one must be greedy the same way one was greedy for that food. Then one must not have different states of mind, anger and delusion.
• Greed cannot liberate anyone from anger and delusion.
• If that greed and all other greed must exist right now, greed must be accumulating and becoming too much to handle.
• And there were times of anger and delusion.
• Can anyone proove they are suffering from all the greed, anger and delusion which they had in the past?

[Bastow:] To allow this would involve admitting that there are in one pudgala two simultaneous cittas, states of consciousness; but this cannot be admitted. However, there must be seeing of either past lobha, or future lobha, or present lobha; otherwise it could not be that someone sees that lobha, akusalamula, is akusala. And in that case it would not happen that someone becomes repelled by lobha, detached, freed from lobha, obtains nirvana (or has obtained or will obtain nirvana).

• Hetu paccaya (root condition)
• Root (anusaya) exists but not as a plant (lobha).

[Anusaya Sutta:] its root destroyed, made like a palmyra stump, deprived of the conditions of development, not destined for future arising; [Thanissaro Bhikkhu] [Anusaya] are identified or associated with kleśa, paryavasthāna, and āsrava, and they are the ‘root’ of bhava [Dr. Ari Ubeysekara:] The seventh and the last of the latent tendencies is [obsession with ignorance (avijjanusaya)] which can be considered as the root cause of all unwholesome actions.

• Root (obsession) of greed is not greed.
• Nibbana is realised by exhausting the past kamma committed based on greed, anger and delusion.
• Anusaya Sutta: Obsessions (1): the seven obsessions

[Bastow:] The same argument is then applied to other things that can be seen with respect to lobha: it can be seen that lobha is a fetter, a bondage, an anusaya; and further that lobha is to be rejected, to be left behind, to be abandoned, to be fully known (prajna).

• Sarvāstivādis knew about anusaya, but they might not understand it as explained by the Sakyamuni Buddha.
• Lobha comes into being when consciousness comes to contact with a sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or thought of an object/subject that is alluring.
• Dosa comes into being when consciousness comes to contact with a sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or thought of an object/subject that is agitating/annoying.
• Moha comes into being when consciousness comes to contact with a sight, sound, smell, taste, touch or thought of an object/subject that is difficult, mysterious, deluding...
• Lobha, dosa, and moha cannot exist at the same moment of consciousness, nor unconscious-ness.
• Lobha, dosa, and moha are cetasika.
• Citta and cetasika need each other's support to stand like the two sheaves of reeds.
• Lobha, dosa, and moha cannot be abandoned, but they must be eradicated by digging out the roots.

Devadaha Sutta (2)

[SN 22:2 Venerable Sāriputta explained to a large number of monks:] ‘When one is not free from passion, desire, love, thirst, fever, & craving for [rūpa], then from any change & alteration in that [rūpa], there arises sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, & despair. When one is not free from passion… for feeling… for perception… for fabrications… & despair. When one is not free from passion, desire, love, thirst, fever, & craving for consciousness... & despair. Seeing this danger, our teacher teaches the subduing of passion & desire for [rūpa]… for feeling… for perception… for fabrications. Seeing this danger our teacher teaches the subduing of passion & desire for consciousness.’

A History of Indian Philosophy Volume 1

by Surendranath Dasgupta 1922 212,082 words ISBN-13: 9788120804081
Quoting Vasumitra (100 A.D.), Surendranath Dasgupta presents three major Mahayanist groups as doctrinally not very different, and the Hindu authors ignored their (minor) differences.

1. Mahāsaṅghikas: the body was filled with mind {citta) which was represented as sitting,
2. Prajñaptivādins: no agent in man, no untimely death, for it was caused by the previous deeds of man,
3. Sarvāstivādins believed that everything existed.

We can observe how all these doctrines are presented in the earliest Mahayanist sutras, particularly the Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra, the Prajñāpāramitāhṛdayasūtra, the Lankavatara Sutra, Saddharma Pundarika Sutra (the Lotus Sutra).

the Prajñaptivādins had inaugurated the Śūnyavāda by drawing up a list of ten emptinesses. In the Mahāvibhāṣā [...] we read [...] there are many śūnyatās [...] Were the Prajñaptivādins the inventors of these ten śūnyatās or were they borrowed from the Mahāyānists? [II. Emptiness in the Hinayānist sects]

Gelongma Karma Migme Chödrön asks that question. The Hindu writers seem to have the answer:

[Dasgupta] When the Hindu writers refer to the Buddhist doctrine in general terms such as “the Buddhists say” without calling them the Vijñānavādins or the Yogācāras and the Śūnyavādins, they often refer to the Sarvāstivādins by which they mean both the Sautrāntikas and the Vaibhāṣikas, ignoring the difference that exists between these two schools.

Nāgārjuna did not consider the Prajñaptivādins as Mahayanists. Mahayana did not exist when the Mahāsaṅghikas was formed after the second schism (Devadatta's schism was the first), so they are considered as Sthaviravādis, who produced Prajñaptivādins and Sarvāstivādins. By AD 5th-6th, Bodhidharma arrived to China, and according to him, Mahayana was well-established as the Yogacara school, which adopted the Lankavatara Sutra.

Bodhidharma was believed to have introduced the Lankavatara Sutra to Chinese Buddhism. This sutra was a development of the Yogacara (“Mind-only”) school of Buddhism established by the great masters Asanga and Vasubandhu, and Bodhidharma is described as a “master of the Lankavatara Sutra”. [ Bodhidharma – the founder of Gongfu (Tsem Rinpoche and Pastor Adeline)]

The authors of the Lankavatara were the Sarvāstivādins.

[Bodhidharma:] the only reason I’ve come to China is to transmit the instantaneous teaching of the Mahayana This mind is the Buddha. (Bloodstream Sermon)
[Bodhidharma:] "This nature is the mind. And the mind is the buddha."
[Lanka:] this triple world is nothing but a complex manifestation of one’s mental activities."

Bodhidharma, known as an expert in the ten-stage sutra, was a zen master, from the Yogacara school. He did not know vipassana, as he condemned arhats. He was clearly a follower of Mahadeva, who authored the five points downgrading the arhats.

[Bodhidharma:] Among Shakyamuni’s ten greatest disciples, Ananda was foremost in learning. But he didn’t know the Buddha. All he did was study and memorize. Arhats don’t know the Buddha...

Bodhidharma did not know the meaning of arhat. Nāgārjuna defines arhat in Mahāprajñāpāramitāśāstra as follow:
[quote]
1. Ara means enemy (ari) and hat means to kill (han). The expression therefore means “killer of enemies”.^\1]) Some stanzas say:

The Buddha has patience (kṣānti) as his armor (varman), Energy (vīrya) as his helmet (śīrṣaka),
Discipline (śīla) as his great steed (mahāśva),
Dhyāna as his bow (dhanus),
Wisdom (prajñā) as his arrows (śara).
Outwardly, he destroys the army of [Māra] (https://www.wisdomlib.org/definition/mara#mahayana) (*mārasena*).
Inwardly, he destroys the passions (kleśa), his enemies.
He is called Arhat.

1. Furthermore, A marks negation and rahat means ‘to be born’. The expression means, therefore, “unborn”. The seeds (bīja) of the mind of the Buddha (buddhacitta) ‘do not arise’ in the field of rebirths (punarbhavakṣetra), for ignorance (avidyā) in him has been dissolved.

[end quote] Nevertheless, the Flower Sermon, which was composed in 1036 states that Mahayana comes from Kashyapa, whom Bodhidharma mentions in the Bloodstream Sermon. Based on Bodhidharma's attitude to the arhats, that Kashyapa could not be the Venerable Mahakassapa, the father of the Sangha who established the Theravada. However, that Kashapa appears in the Lankavatara Sutra:

Kashyapa (fl. 400 B.C.) . Also known as Uruvilva Kashyapa or Mahakashyapa, he was the eldest of the three Kashyapa brothers and among the Buddha’s earliest disciples. He was also India’s First Patriarch of Zen. [Lankavatara Sutra: Glossary. Page 458]

The Mahayanists expect they could become Buddhas by following these individuals.

The Flower Sermon (1036 AD) : the Buddha gathered his disciples together for a talk on Dharma. Instead of speaking, however, the Buddha simply held up a lotus flower in front of him without saying a word. “I possess the true Dharma eye, the marvelous mind of Nirvāṇa, the true form of the formless, the subtle Dharma gate that does not rest on words or letters but is a special transmission outside of the scriptures. This I entrust to Mahakasyapa.”

By popular demand, I guess...
I was kinda just being a smart-ass, but some of you wanted more so here it is: epilogues for every NPC as if they didn't continue to travel with Gorion's Ward and instead just decided to live their own life. Obviously, there are some implied alignment changes here.
This turned out to be longer than I expected and I kinda just threw it all together while I was working. Please excuse any typos or sloppy writing.
I want to apologize for one thing, though. Viconia's epilogue really only works if GW is a male, so I had to make that assumption for the sake of her story. If it matters any, I easily play just as many female GWs as I do male GWs. In fact, I probably play more female GWs because I don't care for the romances, frequently play the canon party, and want to nip the lame Jah romance in the bud.
But, to have them all in one place, I included my original smart-ass epilogues with the additional ones I created. Now, every character from BG1 and BG2 has an epilogue. I don't have the EE characters, though, because I play the original games and don't really know them.
So, just for funsies, which one is your favorite and why?
"Anomen continued to wait at the Copper Coronet for a party of adventurers willing to travel with him. Maybe it was the grating sound of his voice, or perhaps the way he leered at women, but he continued to remain alone. Eventually, he needed to find work to make ends meet. With Gorion's Ward having disbanded the slave traders and pit fights, Hendak had to find a new form of entertainment for the patrons. As such, he invented an all male review ladies night, and Anomen found work as a 'dancer'. He left the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart to join the less noble order of the pole. He also renounced his faith to Helm and instead allied himself with Waukeen because if you wanna see some groin, you gotta have some coin."
"Despite Gorion's Ward clearing the trolls from her keep, Nalia was not able to reclaim her lands and instead lost her estate to Lord Roenall. The lord offered to let her retain residence in her family's ancestral home, but only in exchange for her hand in marriage. Nalia found the proposition to be repugnant. Instead, she salvaged whatever wealth she could from her family's keep and moved to Athkatla to start a new life. She no longer helped the less fortunate, as she was now among their numbers and had her own problems. Nalia's lack of any practical skills combined with her sense of entitlement sent her into a life of failure followed by drinking and debauchery. She now spends more time back at the Copper Coronet than anywhere else. It is hard to say where she squanders her wealth more, the alcohol, or on the dancers during Ladies Night."
"After the incident with the Planar Sphere, Valygar was finally free of his past, could retire to his cabin, and pursue his true passion: writing. Ironically, the only inspiration he found ended up stemming from his family's checkered past. Valygar's only works that even had middling success were 'Tuesdays with Lavok' and 'Dude, Where's My Planar Sphere', with the latter being made into a production at the Five Flagoons Theater."
"Haer'Dalis continued to work as a performer at the Five Flagoons Theater. Unfortunately, it struggled due to poor management. It might have turned out better if an outside agent with fresh ideas had stepped in, but Gorion's Ward had better things to do than be a bard. While the work was generally steady, the returns were not great and the material was a little low-brow for Haer'Dalis' liking. The tiefling realized he reached rock bottom when he was cast as the lead in a play about a buffoon who apparently lost a plane-shifting apparatus the size of a small castle and had to find it before his parents returned from Neverwinter. After the opening night, he took his own life in his dressing room. His body was found the next morning with a note saying, 'Art is dead and I am art, so I shall join art in death.' Biff the Understudy stepped in for Haer'Dalis despite never having an opportunity to read the script. Nevertheless, the production was a resounding success and launched Biff's career to new heights."
“A heartbroken Garrick found work as a character actor at the Five Flagoons Theater, but eventually gained more success as a writer and director. He found it to be a mostly agreeable situation, aside from a tiefling primadonna who would constantly belittle his work and call it ”trite" and “drivel”. Fortunately, that situation worked itself out in time and Garrick found Biff to be much easier to direct. With the tiefling gone, his ideas had room to grow. He invented a new kind of love story, one where the protagonist doesn't always get the girl at the end but the journey to that ending would be quite amusing. He labeled this genre “the Comedy of Romance” and the works were mostly based on his own life. His plays were quite popular among the commoners, with his top selling shows being 'Sleepless in Saradush', 'Silverymoon Linings Playbook', and 'Crazy Rich Aasimars'. He eventually fully transitioned off the stage into the director's chair. By the peak of his fame, he was married to none other than Queen Ellesime."
“Aerie continued to work at the circus and WOULD NOT SHUT UP ABOUT HER DAMN WINGS. Even Quayle eventually grew sick of hearing about it. This put strain on their relationship. Things took a turn for the better when Ribald Barterman acquired a new curiosity for his shop. It was a magical ring which he sold to Quayle at a reduced rate out of sympathy. This ”treasure" was actually a cursed Ring of Deafness, which Quayle found to be anything but a curse and wore it for the rest of his days."
“Xzar and Montaron were both slain at the hands of the Athkatla Harpers, but this is actually where their story begins. Xzar, as he had done so many times before, had a backup plan of an arcane nature should death befall either he or the halfling. Their mortal essences were pulled to a pocket plane he created. There they could be channeled into restored bodies cloned at his estate. With this particular round of ritual, Xzar had incidentally made a slight error in the incantation and the two found themselves in a time suspended state in Xzar's pocket plane. It was only five minutes for the rest of the world, but it was fifty years for them. This turned out to be a pivot point in their relationship. Having only each other's company in this shadowy void, they were finally able to work out their feelings for each other. When they had returned to the prime material plane, they discovered their mutual animosity was replaced with love. Rather than pick up their life where they left off with the Zhentarim, they decided to pack it all in, moved to Bryn Shander, and start a bed and breakfast. Montaron rediscovered his halfling roots and love for the culinary arts while Xzar would perform seances to connect guests with their late loved ones. Scones and Bones became an overnight success and was consistently listed as a “must see” in Volo's travel guides. In their golden years, the couple co-wrote a memoir of their journey, ‘Brokeback Montaron’, which is sold in bookstores everywhere."
“After briefly crossing paths with Gorion's Ward, Mazzy Fentan continued her crusade as a de facto halfling paladin. She eventually found herself petitioning for membership at the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart in Athkatla after she had singlehandedly saved a village from an ancient dracolich. Despite the extent of her virtue and accomplishment, her petition was denied on the basis that halflings could not possibly be real paladins. This inspired her next crusade, one to break down vocational barriers for all demihuman races. Why couldn't halflings be paladins or dwarves be wizards? And why did gnomes always have to be illusionists? It simply made no goddamn sense. She began to get traction with her quest when she attended lectures by the wizards of the (sword) coast in Candlekeep. With their help, she ushered Faerun into a new edition era where there would be no vocational barriers for adventurers based on their race. Soon, the world began to see roguish halflings that also venerated Helm, while tending to the wilds as a druid. Half-orc bards also studied as wizards while manifesting natural arcane abilities as sorcerers. Tiefling paladins took their crusades to the wilderness and served as rangers, while sidelining as clergy to Mystra. The world was now a liberated place, free to not make any goddamn sense in a myriad of new ways. At one point, Lady Mazzy Fentan of Trademeet (now formally a paladin) crossed paths with a dwarven shadowdancebard and in that moment she regretted everything. Seriously, just take a moment and picture that. It would look fucking ridiculous.”
“Yeslick's clanhome was flooded once again. Despondent and without options, he took work at a smithy in Baldur's Gate but never stopped dreaming of finding both a clan and a home. He found a way to bring this dream to life after a courageous halfling paladin broke down the barriers for, among other things, dwarves to be wizards. Yeslick had an idea. He studied magic diligently until he was able to cast two spells of great importance: Water Breathing and Permanence. He then searched the lands for other clanless dwarves who would be willing to try something new. With the new clan he formed, Yeslick permanently gave all his fellow clansman the ability to breath underwater. They then moved into the flooded Cloakwood Mines and built the first underwater dwarven stronghold. Using his arcane powers, Yeslick also developed the ability to speak with the marine life that shared this stronghold. And, with that, the clan Aquadwarf was born. At one point, Valygar visited and wrote a play based on Yeslick's story. However, he couldn't even get it to stage at the Five Flagoons Theater. The illustrious director Garrick was quoted as saying, “A hero that can breath underwater and talk to fish? Nobody would go for that!"
“Keldorn finally retired from the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart and looked forward to a much simpler life. He rekindled his marriage with Lady Maria and life seemed to improve. It was rather early on when the couple discovered that Maria had become pregnant again. It was also not long after that when Peony, the housekeeper, also became pregnant. Maria started to ask Keldorn about this, but Keldorn started to get defensive and asked, ”Hey, who's the Inquisitor here?" Then Keldorn started to do the math with her to track the conception of Maria's pregnancy. She certainly did not want him to get to the end of that equation, so she quickly changed the subject. She suggested getting a new maid, but Keldorn chastised her for abandoning someone in their time of need who had been like family for years. He forbade Peony's departure claiming that his god, Torm, would not stand for it. Maria then made a passive aggressive comment about Torm being the god of loyalty, but she was mostly just muttering under her breath to get the last word in. Eventually, both children were born and had probably the most awkward upbringing of anyone in Faerun."
“After Gorion's Ward helped Coran take down a wyvern, the rogue brought the beast's head back to the mayor of Beregost for the reward and accolades. He thought this put him in a position to be a hero of great renown and perhaps, just maybe, people would stop mocking him for his flashy attire and completely superfluous eye mask. They didn't. He only gained acceptance when he crossed paths with a ranger who seemed indifferent towards Coran's keen fashion sense. Coran traveled the Sword Coast with his ranger sidekick, righting the wrongs against the ‘little guy’ and taking the law into their own hands when needed. This partnership dissolved when he discovered that the ranger thought Coran was the sidekick. As if! Coran tried to correct the ranger, whose argument was, 'Really, man, if that outfit doesn't scream sidekick then I'm Elminster's twin brother.' The ranger was not related to Elminster and shared no resemblance.
“Kivan never was able to get his revenge on Tazok. Unbeknownst to him, that honor was taken by Gorion's Ward. His thirst for vengeance continued to eat away at him until he found himself in a bat infested cave in the wilderness. It was then he snapped. He turned the cave into his secret hideaway, put together a disguise and started wandering the sword coast looking for evil-doers to punish. He would leave his calling card wherever he saved the day, a token of a bat with longer ears like an elf. And bats already had rather long ears so these bat ears were almost comically obtrusive. Nevertheless, his deeds were generally appreciated and the people stared calling him Bat-elf. For a short spell, another elf tagged along with him and tried to help, but he was so flamboyantly dressed that one could pick his sidekick out of the shadows blindfolded. Kivan eventually had to send him on his way. Unfortunately, his vigilante crusade abruptly ended after receiving a cease and decist order from DC Comics. Kivan could fight both monster and marauder all day, but his 14 Constitution wouldn't hold up against a lawsuit for trademark infringement.”
“Skie was deeply affected by both the death of her brother and the assassination of her father. And yes, her father was actually murdered and didn't lol-jk back to life in some crappy DLC. In any event, through these traumas, she came to realize the puerility of what she thought was her brilliant criminal masterminding. Instead, she decided to settle down and live a more responsible life as an upstanding citizen of Baldur's Gate. She took the reins of her father's estate after his death and rose to prominence as one of the Grand Dukes of the city. She maintained her relationship with Eldoth for quite some time, inexplicably, as he refused to get a job because he didn't want to take attention from his band which he swore was going to make it. However, the bard spent most of the day either lounging at Skie’s estate or gambling away his allowance with games of three-dragon-ante at the Helm and Cloak. Eventually, inspired by the book “Men Are From Menzoberranzan, Women Are From Immilmar," she decided to call it quits with Eldoth and sent him packing. Shortly thereafter, she met a man who was nothing like Eldoth and they settled down together to start a family."
“Eldoth's dreams of being a world-famous musician fronting the greatest band in Faerun never reached fruition. This was partly because he didn't actually have a band and partly because he didn't have the talent to write music. Instead, he just had a lute he purchased at Lucky Aello's Discount Store that only had one A-string and was missing the E-string. Also, Eldoth could only play power chords and he couldn't really sing and play at the same time. Most of the time he would just strum a chord or two and then talk about what the song would do next, often describing a solo and half playing it on an ”air lute" (while he was still holding an actual lute, mind you) to give people the idea as to how the song would sound when it was finally written. Yeah, he was one of those guys. After Skie kicked him to the curb, he bounced between various barmaids who clearly had low self-esteem, but not low enough to keep him around for long. Eventually, he got one of them pregnant and was forced into a shotgun wedding by the barmaid's father. He now works in the kitchen at the same inn as his barmaid wife. She helps the customers up front and he cooks eggs in the back. Eldoth continues to tell himself that this experience will just provide inspiration for his music and that someday he was going to get the band back together."
“After being rescued by Gorion's Ward, Xan made his way to Baldur's Gate to regroup. He spent an inordinate amount of time beating himself up over his failures and trying to muster the gumption to continue his quest to unravel the political turmoil of the region. However, it took him months to get to this point, and by that time, Gorion's Ward already sorted out the problems in the region. Discovering this, he deemed himself a failure yet again and sunk into a deeper depression. He pulled himself out of it when he met a woman who lost most of her family to violent deaths during the iron crisis, yet she still kept herself together and became a local success in a few short years. Xan immediately fell in love with the recently single Skie Silvershield and began to court her. They eventually married and started a family. At Xan's insistence, and inspired by his wife's name, their two daughters were named Sunshine and Rainbow. Xan was a staunch supporter of his wife's career and stayed home to raise the kids. When they were older and needed less attending, he followed a new dream and became a motivational speaker.”
“Korgan had his revenge against his backstabbing crew and employer, but he felt...empty. It was done, but he felt no satisfaction. Disgruntled and disappointed, he decided to lose himself in his cups at the Copper Coronet. Even this did nothing to alleviate his malaise. One night, having passed out drunk in a peasant room at the Copper Coronet, he dreamt of that final fight but something was different. In the background of the battle, there was a glow coming from the door of a shack and he heard the whispering of a language that sounded like it was from Kara-Tur. When he woke the next morning, Korgan returned to the rooftop and found the shack from his dream. He knocked and was greeted by a priest of Illmater. Korgan told the priest of his dream and he was led into the backroom where he found a man from Kara-Tur infirm and huddled over a cup of tea. The priest explained that he had just reincarnated this man of the faith using a heart delivered by a passing adventurer. Korgan took this as a sign, converted to the faith, and the two paired up to help those in suffering as a result of the schemes of others. The tales of Korgan and Yoshimo were not only told in many of a tavern by the bards, but also collected in graphic serials that were popular among the children of Athkatla.”
“Ajantis' death sent him into an afterlife at Everwatch, the realm of Helm. For his honor and diligence, the devout knight was granted an audience with his patron. Ajantis then told Helm what utter bullshit the god was. I mean, c'mon, he's the god of protection, the Vigilant One, and he couldn't protect a group of knights from a dragon's cheap illusion spell that a mage even tried to dispel with True Sight? It was like Helm wasn't even trying. Helm was stunned by the confrontation but also had no valid defense. Ajantis called Helm to a trial that was mediated by Tyr. After careful deliberation, Tyr determined that Helm was sleeping on the job and the judgment was to demote him to a lesser deity. Now, Helm was the patron of guards, but not actual guards that ever see action, just the ceremonial ones whose weapons and armor are super shiny and probably not even real. Ajantis was then granted Helm's old portfolio and became a god that truly protected his followers.”
“Viconia left Athkatla's government district perplexed. She was rescued from burning at the stake by Gorion's Ward and then immediately dismissed. She found this to be unusual behavior for a male. She was accustomed to men either trying to bed her or kill her, but this casual indifference was completely new. Viconia came to be obsessed with Gorion's Ward from a distance. She spiraled into a fantasy where the two of them had a future together. It was pretty bad. There were some extremely embarrassing vision boards involved and that wasn't even the worst of it. When her mania reached critical mass, her obsession actually collapsed and she had an epiphany. She came to realize that she did not need this man, or any for that matter. She started on a journey of self discovery and took a moral inventory of her past relationships. She wrote about it in the book, “Men Are From Menzoberranzan, Women Are From Immilmar”. She then used the revenue from the book sales to open Athkatla's first feminist bookstore. In Her Words became a mecca for women, particularly those who felt trapped in bad relationships. The community that emerged here created the group, Friends of Galia, which strove to free women from abusive relationships. Eventually, the bookstore expanded to include an apartment block above that became a shelter for such women. Occasionally, the partners of these victims would come around to In Her Words in an attempt to drag their partners back home. You can probably guess how a confrontation between a drunken 0-level commoner and a Drow priestess of Shar ends."
“Faldorn was defeated by Jaheira in Trademeet and lost her title of Arch-Druid. In truth, she was relieved to be relieved of the position. Years of pushing forward the Shadow Druid agenda led Faldorn to realize that she had lost touch with the real Faldorn along the way. After some soul-searching, she reinvented herself as a lifestyle guru and developed an entire line of organic health and beauty products under the name, She-Wolf. Both her products and seminars were all the rage in Athkatla, specifically among noblewomen who clearly had too much free time. Faldorn eventually gave up her residence in natural environs for a lavish estate in Athkatla's government district. Her following soon pressured her to petition to join the Council of Six after the fall of the Cowled Wizards left the position open (aside from a short-term replacement). Her petition was a success and she soon found herself on the Council of Six. Under her leadership, she created created the FDAA, the Food and Drink Association of Athkatla. Now, instead of draconian rules governing magic in the city, equally restrictive rules and standards were applied to the food and drink that the people consumed.”
“Barely surviving being gravely wounded by Irenicus, Tiax left Spellhold for Athkatla where he intended to do what he did best: rule. Learning from his past campaign mistakes in Baldur's Gate, he changed his slogan from ”Tiax Rules!" to “Make Athkatla Great Again”. Of course, what he thought would make Athkatla great was putting himself in charge as a despotic leader. But, he toned down that aspect of his platform and instead focused on the history of scheming and backroom dealing of the Cowled Wizards (as if he was any less evil or scheming) and promised the people he would be different than all the other corrupt politicians. Miraculously, despite his obviously apparent character flaws, he succeeded in replacing the Cowled Wizards' representative on the Council of Six. He decided to take their stance on restrictive magic to the next level and banned magic entirely. Since he didn't study the arcane himself, it was no skin of his nose. This move undermined his support base leaving him with only the most backwards and ignorant followers. He was ultimately removed from his position when he insisted the city build a wall around the planar sphere and was expecting that the city's wizards would be the ones to pay for it. After his removal, his few remaining extreme supporters organized an invasion of the main government building under the guise of freedom of assembly. All nine of these “rebels” were rounded up, tried, and sent to prison. Tiax was convicted of treason and reincarnated in Spellhold, which was now just a common prison. After his eventual release, he was prohibited from seeking any position of power in Amn."
"Edwin Odesseiron continued to lay low with the Shadow Thieves for a while. The Cowled Wizards suffered a crippling blow as a side effect of the conflict between Gorion's Ward and Irenicus. Edwin decided to step in and finish the job. His thought was that he could wipe out the Cowled Wizard remnants and then take credit for their defeat, thereby gaining him more clout among the Red Wizards of Thay. After many conspicuous mage battles in the streets of Athkatla, he succeeded. However, the people who noticed his efforts the most were actually the people of Athkatla. They were tired of living under the Cowled Wizards' iron fist and Edwin was lauded as a liberator and hero. He even had a statue in his image raised in Waukeen's Promenade. Edwin was initially nonplussed over people finally giving him the credit he always felt he so rightfully deserved. But, he quickly came to accept their praise and bought in to being a champion for the people. Edwin continued his agenda of liberation when a clearly insane gnome who found his way on the Council of Six tried to ban magic entirely in the city. Edwin and his followers were primarily responsible for having the madman removed from his seat.
“Shar-Teel, Safana, Branwen, and Alora all happened to cross paths with each other at Elfsong one evening. Shar-Teel was looking to fight a man, Safana was looking to shag a man, Branwen was recently petrified by a man, and Alora was just excited to be somewhere new. The four got to talking with each other and, despite having wildly different personalities, seemed to hit it off. Shar-Teel was sarcastic and aggressive, Safana was self-absorbed and man-hungry, Alora was kind and sweet, and Branwen was the matriarch of the group. You wouldn't think this lot would get along, but they actually did, and their differences merely become the fuel for innocuous hi-jinks week after week.”
"With Gorion's Ward's help, Cernd was able to rescue his child that he then abandoned again at the druid grove near Trademeet. He promised that he would return to raise the child, he just needed to run to the general shop in Trademeet for some pipeweed. He never returned, but that was pretty obvious since he didn’t even smoke. Cernd continued to wander Faerun. It came to light in Cormyr that Cernd had actually married, and had children, with numerous women in Cormyr, Amn, the Sword Coast, Tethyr, Calimshan, Turmish, Halruaa, Icewind Dale, Chondath, Sembia, Impiltur, the Silver Marches, and even the Troll Hills (don't ask). Furthermore, it was discovered that Cernd was not actually a druid, just a werewolf that had a Ring of Goodberries. The druid con was so that he could have a reason to abandon his wives and children and move on to a new situation. You would be surprised at how many women could fall for a guy that can conjure an impromptu picnic in the park. Unfortunately for Cernd, Cormyr was not the kind of place to run afoul of the legal system. For the crime of bigamy, he was sentenced to life in prison. He never set foot near a druid grove again, but he was allowed to participate in a work-release program tending to the gardens of nobles.
“Kagain returned to his shop and grew even more bitter, but not over what the death of Entar Silvershield's son had done to his reputation and business. Instead, he resented that even the Enhanced Edition of the game didn't give him a remotely decent companion quest. By Moradin's hammer, Cernd even had a pretty involved companion quest and the story there both starts and ends with a deadbeat dad! Also, Kagain can regenerate! Korgan can't even do that. And another thing! He was sick of people confusing the two of them as if all dwarves look alike or something. Ok, granted, they're both old dwarves with greying beards, but Korgan's beard is tied while Kagain's beard is brushed out. Of course, none of this made sense to anyone, even to Kagain who never actually crossed paths with Cernd or Korgan. However, the dwarf had nothing to do with his time except stand in his shop, isolated and alone, until he was done in by insanity and plantar fasciitis.”
“The death of Khalid shook Jaheira to the core. She convinced herself that she could never love again, certainly not so soon after his death nor with anyone that would be a child in her eyes. That would be absurd and rather tacky. After her escape from Irenicus' prison and deposing Faldorn from the druid grove, she took over as Arch-Druid. Being a Harper just wouldn't be the same without Khalid. However, the grove would allow her to explore a new, but comfortingly familiar, phase of life. She had barely been installed as the Arch-Druid when Cernd dropped off his child and disappeared again. He did not even stay long enough to tell Jaheira the child's name. Knowing he would likely not return, she named the child Khalid after her lost love. Realizing there were other children our there without families to care for them, Jahaeira would send her subordinates to wander nearby lands and bring them to the grove for a better life. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these children happened to be Cernd's. She eventually renamed the grove to Kinder Garden in honor of the grove's new purpose of giving these children a kinder upbringing. Jaheira's headstrong personality served her well with these lost children, who all loved her as they would any mother. The Kinder Garden became the most thriving druid grove in all of Faerun. Jaheira eventually died in 1547 DR, with hundreds of children haven been rescued in her lifetime, and a memorial was erected in her honor at the grove. The inscription read, 'Nature's Servant Awaits.'"
“After being freed from Irenicus' dungeon, Minsc put his boots on the ground at the Copper Coronet. Being the simple man that he was, he found himself unwittingly recruited into fighting in the gladiator pits (before Gorion's Ward was able to free the slaves). Yet again, Minsc took a blow to the head. But this time, its effects were something completely new. No longer was he the slow-witted evil-slaying ranger, armed to the teeth and packing a hamster. Instead, his intelligence and wisdom started to blossom and he explored, through dissertation, the impact of modern civilization on the overall ecosystem of Faerun. Indeed, before Minsc started his work, the people of Faerun didn't even have the concept of an ”ecosystem". He left Athkatla to pursue a residency at Jaheira's grove where he could study and work in peace. He published works like, “The Intersection of Geopolitics and Biodiversity: Living More but Dying Sooner”, “The Essential Symbiosis Between the Savage and Civilization”, and “Moral Urbanization: Seeking a More Comprehensive Prosperity”. Minsc continued his studies and writing and ultimately produced enough groundbreaking works to have his own annex in Candlekeep. It was shortly after the dedication of this annex that Minsc disappeared from Faerun, never to be seen again."
“Jan Jansen's fate was the most impressive of all as his endeavors shaped the very fabric of Faerun for centuries to come. His story truly serves as a moral lesson for everyone and we should heed its virtue quite seriously. Helping Lissa and Jaella planted a seed of regret in Lissa with regards to her marriage to Vaelag. Speaking of seeds, this reminds Jan of a time when he was helping his Uncle Scratchy with his turnip farm. However, Uncle Scratchy was hoodwinked and the seeds he received were actually purple carrot seeds. You can imagine Uncle Scratchy's surprise when they sprouted and he suddenly had a field of purple carrots. Well, as you probably know, you can't make turnip stew, or turnip casserole, or turnip pie with purple carrots. But it just so happened there was a mage tower nearby and the resident mage needed a vast number of carrots. Apparently, her plan was to animate them as a kind of vegetable army to combat a myconid infestation in cave system rather close to her tower. Of course, animated carrots are quite self-assured and were immune to myconoid's confusion spores. Anyway, Jan had a once-removed cousin, Bobil, that was lost in those caves when he was a young gnome. He had wandered so deep that he found himself in the den of a solitary xvart who was obsessed with a magic ring. Bobil happened to purloin that ring but it turned out to not be magic at all. However, it was still worth enough for Bobil to buy himself a nice cottage in Trademeet. He then started his own turnip farm and had better luck than Uncle Scratchy. Wait, what were we talking about, again?”
“Boo continued his mission to study the sentient life forms of Faerun and determine their potential impact on the metaverse. He preferred the continued company of Minsc due to the ranger's kindness and protectiveness. Boo found this to be quite valuable in his current miniaturized state. Even after Minsc's accident, where his intellect began to expand, Minsc never lost his good heart and inherent kindness and the two remained the best of friends. It was a number of years later that the term of Boo's mission was complete. A team of his fellow people arrived on a spelljammer to collect the giant miniaturized space hamster. Minsc (and Boo) were on a retreat in a remote part of the Neverwinter Wood when a vessel shaped like a giant acorn landed in a nearby clearing. A number of human-sized anthropomorphic hamster-like beings, who called themselves the Ysoki, emerged and met with Boo. One had a strange crystalline device which it used to restore Boo to his proper size. Minsc naturally remained composed while all this was happening. He and Boo talked often and he knew this day would be coming. Boo returned to the spelljammer with his brethren to debrief on the mission. The Ysoki wanted to bring a sample back to their homeworld for further learning and study. Boo offered Minsc for the task, as the exemplar human would fit in nicely with the Ysoki's advanced culture and society. Everyone was in agreement and made the offer to the ranger. Minsc felt like he had made every contribution he could to the people of Faerun, so he accepted and boarded the ship. Boo, excited to finally be on a spelljammer again, took the helm and plotted a course for his homeworld. At his side sat his friend and faithful companion, Minsc.”

Antisemitism:
I'll make it clear quickly. I'm not saying you have to agree with all of what Israel does, or any of it for that matter because let's be honest BiBi is an idiot and needs to go: but to deny the right of Israel's existance is to deny the legitimacy of a Jewish state. I've never seen this argument come up with Islamic states, nor have I seen this with Christian countries like the one I live in. The only arguments I seem to come across is secularisation theory which states all religions will be forgotten once we adopt science. Without getting into that can of worms it should be said that Israel's right to exist, as every named state within the rules of international law is final, and a states dissolution can only happen through complete conquest or self destruction.
Israeli identity has always been strong, I mean look at festivals like Hannukah and Passover within the Jewish faith and you'll see that Judaism and Israel are two sides of the same coin as the religion operates within the gift of a nomadic society of former slaves, the Hebrews, being given the gift of a homeland. To deny the right of Israel's existance is therefore to deny the existance of Judaism, which subsequently denies the existance of all Jews. I'm right here, right now, typing this up. I am a jew. I'm a proud Jew and I exist. Jews exist. Israel and Jerusalem exist. It has long before I was born, and it will exist long after I'm dead. I'm tired of having to hide my identity as a Jew both online and in person. The reason I've had to hide it was because people on the whole just hate Jews. I understand it you disagree with actions taken by the Jewish state but to deny the right for Israel to exist is to deny my right to exist.
It would be identical to telling a Christian that the Vatican city must cease to exist due to the crusades killing millions, or telling a Muslim to give up Mecca due to the first and second caliphate taking the region by the sword in the name of islam and Mohammed. All religions, and all states have done things that they're not proud of. Take the Germans for example, who quite literally had Hitler and the Nazis. Did I like what Hitler did? Not really he killed half of my family. But does that make me hate Germans? No. It never has and it never will. Germans have a right to exist. Germany has a right to exist. It always has, and it always will; just like Israel or any other nation state.
This may lead you to say: well what about Palestine?
The two kinds of Palestinian:
Palestine, or more specifically the group of people calling themselves Palestinians are yet to declare themselves a state for two reasons. The first is that there are Egyptian and Jordanian Palestinians, and they do not get on. To call each other one and the same would be an insult to themselves because of Egypt and Jordan's history with one another. As I'm writing this, I can link this to quote a few jokes about the Ashkenaz and Sephardis. They just write themselves. Anyways, back to the problem with most people's understanding of the history of the conception of Palestinians and why making one collective people can't really happen. The second part of why Palestinians can't be one collective plays off of the first. Jordanian and Egyptian sub-sects cause uprisings in the '70s after the six day war as the two groups that end up both calling themselves Palestinians think that Jordan and Egypt respectively should carry on attacking Israel until they have victory or death. Read about the last line of defence at Golan and decide for yourself which is more likely if you're really willing to look into how successful this mindset would have been. This is the reason we have both black and red keffiyehs, as both colours come from two different countries. The red is Jordanian from what I know if you were curious. Anyways both communities carry on this victim mentality of victory or death and see themselves as a sort of Martyr nation through their own political beliefs and developments over time, and so when they see eachother playing the same beat they get really pissed off with each other. Think of little Britain and the 'i am the only gay in the village' skit. It's almost exactly like that unfortunately.
This leads to my conclusion on the second part of this. I just want the west bank Palestinians and Gazan Palestinians to consolidate a solid sense of identity outside of hating my race and leave the past and their version of evens behind. What happened happened. In war no one really wins you just have survivors with more land because the people that were there beforehand are either dead or left. Both Jews and Arabs have experienced that. Frequently. Both communities are so damn similar in our sense of humour, history, food and fashion sense 🤣.
The superpower:
All jokes aside we're so much more similar than we think so whats the point of hating each other? Yes, I'm a jew. I understand that a lot of people hate me. But I think that if we just sit and talk about our cultural experiences Jews and Arabs are going to realise how much we have in common and there's just no point fighting because it's essentially killing the closest thing to you. In most languages the people closest to you are called family. Let's stop killing our own family and realise two things: one, Jews and Arabs are almost identical in how we perceive identity and culture and two, the middle east if it united itself would have enough cultural history through islam and Judaism, it's subsequent mathematical, scientific and economic wisdoms and resources to be the largest superpower the world has ever seen in recorded history. So whilst I'd like to address the anti-Semitism in this sub in the immediate I'm genuinely serious about staring a Judeo-Christo-Islamic empire but that's probably because I'm 5 coffees deep into a long work night at god knows how late.
TL;DR: Jews exist and so does Israel. Doesn't mean Israel's always right but don't deny it should exist. See Germany, the Vatican city/Italy and Greece and apply the same logic. It doesn't make sense. It's just masked antisemitism. Palestine isn't a state yet. It should be. West bank and Gazan Palestinians need to consolidate and get on with each other. Palestinians, Israelis and all Jews/Arabs are really similar so the conflict is nonsensical. (Almost feels like we were made to fight a proxy war because the USA and Russia realised the middle east once united would be the biggest superpower of all time and due to the rich cultural and racial ties wouldn't slow down in thousands of years, it would just keep getting stronger.) Let's stop fighting each other and talk about what we should be doing as Jews, Muslims, Arabs, Israelis or just human beings so that both sides can learn to love each other like the family it is.
PS: I hope we all have a little think about the Israeli- Arab conflict in light of this: "Almost feels like we were made to fight a proxy war because the USA and Russia realised the middle east once united would be the biggest superpower of all time and due to the rich cultural and racial ties, as well as the wealth of resources and the fantastic scientific , mathematical and philosophical minds these two races have created (Einstein, Rumi, Abu Shuja, Oppenheimer ect) wouldn't slow down in thousands of years, it would just keep getting stronger. "

Link to AO3
chapters 1&2
chapter 3
chapter 4
chapter 5
chapter 6
chapter 7
chapter 8
chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
The Academy looked normal enough from the distance but blew Gentry’s mind when she finally entered it. First of all, the way in lay through a massive winter garden full of the most luxurious botanical collection she’s ever seen. Not only that, but it seemed to be arranged in a way that offered spaces for hanging out as well as paths in and out. Here and there, G noticed little nooks with people’s voices coming from them and small murmuring streams gleamed in the sun that blazed through the transparent walls and roof. This place looked magical and invited to stay, enjoy the refreshing coolness and peace of mind. But Gentry had a good enough rest in her communal room the night before and was eager to start working on her first assignment that the System had spat out with a congratulating letter. Figuring out the controls of her new wristcomm was simple enough.
DEAR GENTRY!
WE ARE DELIGHTED TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU ARE THE FIRST CONTESTANT TO CLEAR ALL CHALLENGES AND OBTAIN THE STATUS OF AN ASHTAPADAN NEWCOMER! YOUR MEDICAL DATA HAS BEEN ANALYSED AND FOUND ACCEPTABLE.
IN THE ATTACHMENT TO THIS LETTER YOU WILL FIND A LIST OF RULES, RECOMMENDATIONS AND IDEAS THAT WILL DEFINITELY HELP YOU IN THE FIRST WEEKS IN OUR BEAUTIFUL CITY BUT WE STRONGLY RECOMMEND FINDING A BUDDY THAT WOULD BE YOUR MAIN GUIDE AND POTENTIALLY A NEW GREAT FRIEND! IT CAN BE ANY CITIZEN OR A MORE EXPERIENCED NEWCOMER.
YOUR CURRENT POINTS: 0
WHY NOT START EARNING SOME WITH YOUR FIRST ASSIGNMENT?
START ANY BEGINNER COURSE AT THE ACADEMY AND KEEP YOUR ATTENDANCE RATE OVER 80% — WORTH 50 POINTS
(OPTIONAL) FIND SOMEBODY WHO IS WILLING TO BECOME YOUR BUDDY — WORTH 20 POINTS
Without stopping to check if the vending machines offered anything good, G made her way through the dreamy garden and entered the inner yard that looked just like everything here: nothing too eye-catching at first glance but secrets hidden everywhere.
One thing she had already noticed was that most of the people had another piece of technology on their bodies besides the comm on their wrists: a sort of extendable visor that some of them kept engaged at all times. Those who were focused on the screen had a comical look on their faces, a thousand-mile stare, eyes wide even as they were talking to each other or going about their business. It was unclear yet why they would engage the screen for so long though. No one needed this much time to read a notification or check a map.
Take a group of young students by the fountain, for example. They seemed deep in conversation with each other yet their pupils didn’t focus on the person in front, but on the translucent screen over the top part of their faces. Was it some kind of virtual reality helmet?
If so, G needed one, too.
Perhaps she’d be able to make new friends this way.
There was something else that caught Gentry’s eye. Despite her initial disappointment about the severe lack of male hotness in the streets, people of both sexes seemed to really care about their appearance. Even those who probably weren’t naturally stunning were very interesting to look at not least because of the crazy fashion sense everyone here had. Never before had G seen so much variety in what everyone wore: countless variations on different national garments, some looking very traditional, like something one could see in a theatre, some — futuristic uniforms straight out of a sci-fi movie. It didn’t seem like anyone was concerned with gender norms here, too. At least in when it came to the outfits.
G hoped she didn’t look like a creepy stalker when her gaze lingered on a pair of very nicely shaped legs stretching from underneath a plaid skirt that belonged to a young man in the group sat by the edge of the water. A pair of snow-white knee-highs, flat loafers and neat raven hair with some blue streaks completed the image. His clothes fit him very well and weren’t inappropriate in the least: something an old money university student would wear.
A female student that is.
And he wasn’t alone. Here and there, among more conventionally dressed people, there were people wearing all sorts of things: a crazy mix of goth-like apparel but barefoot, men and women with heads covered with scarves, people in strange jewelery that looked like it weighed a ton and so on. Most importantly, no one seemed to care what the others looked like.
Was it paradise? Looks like the demo didn’t lie: it was heaven on earth.
The young man in the middle of the student gaggle caught her staring after all. With a dazzling smile, he waved in her direction as if they were great friends, and G waved back, face heating, hoping there wasn’t anyone behind her this tease was actually waving at. Thank god his shoes weren’t heeled, otherwise she would definitely have a heart attack right here, in the middle of the common area, on her first day.
Did he notice her ogling his legs? Judging by the giggles of his friend's entourage, they all did. The young flirt covered his mouth, eyes wide in mock indignation and pulled his knees in, as if hiding them from the improper attention, getting even more laughter from the rest of the company. G averted her eyes and tried to calm her breathing as she was on her way through the yard again, but before they all disappeared from her field of view, she noticed the coquette stretch his legs again and fall back on a friend of his, embracing the lucky man’s neck in an affectionate gesture, already forgetting G existed.
There was no way she wasn’t going to make some pretty boy do the same for her. Forget the assignment, put that in the list of her top priorities!
At first, Gentry was lost when she failed to find any kind of class schedule and there was no one to ask at the reception desk.
Why have a reception desk if nobody’s on duty?
Soon, however, it occurred to her that there was no schedule: each room within the wide marble corridors had a small display with a handwritten message scribbled on it.
Bachata for beginners
Product engineering (Tuesday class cancelled)
Colloidal chemistry (revision today)
None of these were the Communications course that Jey was talking about, but the variety definitely made G’s eyebrows go up.
Was she just supposed to barge into any class and sign up? Did she have to sign up later if she liked the subject? Was it ok to choose any?
After some wandering around, too scared to just walk in uninvited or ask others for directions, she finally stumbled across the door saying:
Communication & decision making course (Newcomers welcome)
With the desks arranged in a horseshoe and the people of various ages that were also apparently Newcomers, it all seemed comfortably casual. Everyone was chatting as she walked in, paying G no mind so she busied herself with the wristcomm that dinged at exactly the right time to save her the embarrassment of looking for a desk.
Would you like to enroll in this course? Scroll down to read the description.
Was this damn thing a spying device? Did it just know which room she was in? Jey didn’t joke when she said the little thing was going to be her primary aid!
“Are you looking for somewhere to sit?” called a young red-haired woman at one of the paired desks. “Here, this one is free.” She had the auglasses on, like everyone else, but they were off, showing her lively face and a pair of sharp green eyes.
“Thanks,” G said, gratefully taking the offer. “I’m new here, don’t know how things work yet.”
“It’s alright, the course is very engaging, you’ll love it.” — the woman held out a hand — “I’m Sereen, what’s your name?”
G shook the warm palm. “It’s Gentry. And by new I mean I’m new to Ashtapada, not just the course. Literally arrived yesterday.”
“Really?” — S looked surprised — “Everything must be very confusing!”
“You have no idea,” G smiled. “I’m glad someone understands. Everyone’s friendly but acts as if giant mechanical dogs in the streets and a moss garden in the lobby are the most normal things ever.”
“Don’t worry, I was just like you when I first arrived, you’ll get the hang of it soon.”
“Hope so! Is that the lecturer?”
“Shhh...”
Just like everything else in Ashtapada, the lecture started out normal enough only to unfold into something completely alien to how things were normally done.
Apparently, the Communications course involved learning rationality, debating, logic, etiquette and god knew what else. It was supposed to give the future citizens tools to, well, communicate. G was given a booklet with some ground rules for beginners that included entries that sounded like something Sun Tzu would say if he studied debating instead of warcraft.
“The purpose of any argument is not to win it and not to change the other disputant’s mind. It’s to find the truth.”
“Always argue in good faith.”
“Don’t attack your opponent.”
“If attacked, dismiss the attack as if it didn’t happen.”
Well, hopefully, it only meant verbal attacks! G knew too well that when it came to physical violence, it was hard to ignore it.
Most of the rules looked straightforward enough, some were confusing.
“Seek challenge to your convictions. Avoid echo chambers.”
“Don’t seek being right.”
“Be mindful of your audience including yourself.”
“Avoid “Empty arguments” that don’t bring everyone closer to the goal of finding the truth.”
The lecturer, a willowy man of about sixty that drowned in his tweed jacket, started the class with a bit of small talk with the regulars after distributing the booklets to all first-timers. He made sure to give it to G face down so that his photo under the “About the author” title didn’t go unnoticed. He also made most of the “talk” part himself.
“I never took part in a debate,” G told Sereen, who was patiently waiting for the class to begin. “And never seen anything like these rules. Is it actually useful?”
“Oh, believe me, professor Poe will be ecstatic to talk to you about them. He can’t not start discussing his subject at the slightest provocation. Look.” — she raised her hand — “Professor, how was your weekend?”
The man wearily smiled. “That might seem like a meaningless question, Sereen, but it’s actually very much related to the topic we are going to cover today.”
“See?” — S raised her eyebrows with a suppressed smile. G giggled. This promised to be interesting.
“Our friend Sereen is a very polite person, isn’t she?” — Poe smiled at the class but his eyes glided over everyone’s faces, gaze turned inwards like he was reading an invisible text written on the walls. “But as kind as she is, I don’t think she’s actually interested in how my weekend went. Small talk is just a social custom we engage in to strengthen our social relations. Why don’t we just start a day by saying “Hi! I value our relationship and would like to fulfill my societal role!” to everyone we know? I would definitely prefer THAT over the small talk! He-he!”
The audience laughed politely. The guy seemed alright.
“However, just as we use different tools to fulfill this role in different contexts, so can the context of a logical problem steer our thinking towards a rational, that is, right, and an irrational, that is, wrong, answer.”
“Well, that’s not a given,” Gentry mumbled under her breath but it went unnoticed by S, who was already immersed in the lecture.
“Consider the famous René Descartes’s quote "Cogito, ergo sum". Who can translate it from Latin?” — the board behind the thin, almost transparent man glowed, displaying the words.
“Is it really a Beginner’s course?” G asked Sereen in a low voice but her companion was already raising her hand, together with a dozen other students.
“I think, therefore I am,” she said after a curt nod of the lecturer’s permission.
“Very good,” he continued, pleased. “I taught you well. Those of you who attend my lectures regularly are familiar with the notion of solipsism, which states that the only thing we can be sure about is our own thoughts.”
Gentry looked at S with raised eyebrows.
If this is an introductory course, what was the advanced like?
Sereen didn’t seem to perplexed. She was fully following the thread.
“However,” professor Poe said. “I am going to challenge that notion by demonstrating that we can’t trust our own mind when it comes to perceiving reality.”
He looked at the audience with a quizzical eye, and pointed at Gentry with a long bony finger “You, new girl. I want you to close your eyes.”
Why her?
Gentry was only happy to hide behind her eyelids. No doubt the whole room was now staring at her.
Through the blood rushing in her ears, she heard the old man’s voice, “Who was sitting beside you before you closed your eyes?”
“My new friend Sereen,” G answered and heard a little gasp of appreciation from the woman.
“So you know she existed as long as you two were whispering behind my back. However, now that you can’t see or hear her. How do you know she exists?”
“Well, I can reach with my hand and touch her,” Gentry said, demonstrating.
“Yes, this is what most people answer,” Poe said. “You can open your eyes now. But let me ask you this: how would you know it was her, an not some other person that took her place?”
Gentry’s intuition was right: everyone was staring, as if waiting for her answer.
“Well, I suppose— ”
“Hush, it was a rhetorical question,” the professor cut her off. “The correct answer is that you can’t know that. We think we can trust our senses or at least our thoughts, but this is also false. Everyone, look out of the window.”
Everyone did.
The day was as fine as Gentry was annoyed.
What did this pops think of himself?
“I’d ask what you see, but I already know the answer,” he went on. “All of you would say “the sky”. And all of you would be wrong, because sky doesn’t exist. We only see the endless emptiness of the outer space, but perceive it as a blue dome. It’s an illusion, a phantom, born out of our collective unconscious.”
Sereen whispered, lost in the lecture, “Ah, yes, Carl Jung.”
What?
Was it supposed to be obvious?
“But listen to this,” he continued, voice booming like a demiurge’s in the completely silent room. “Listen to this. How many words is it? Listentothis. Our common sense says it’s three words while in reality it’s just a string of sounds I an producing with my mouth. I am literally making you hallucinate the spaces between the words I’m saying. With knowing that our perception is so flawed, how can we know that we even know how to think?”
“I’m sorry, professor, I disagr...” G started but got struck down by his serrated gaze.
“I’ll invite questions at the end, young miss,” he chopped out.
Sereen’s eyes were sympathetic. It looked like most if not all of professor Poe’s students had learned not to interrupt him.
He went on, “Anyway, the fact that you even understand what I am saying is in itself incredible and shouldn’t be possible.”
“But it IS possible, right?” G whispered to Sereen. “I mean, aren’t we understanding this as he speaks?”
“PLEASE refrain from talking unless asked!” professor Poe roared.
Impressive lung capacity for such a frail human being!
G begrudgingly did as she was told. The guy seemed to be enjoying this power trip a bit too much to her taste.
“Now, since most of you,” he put some emphasis on the word to shut up another pair of whispering students. “Most of you think you comprehend my words, you must know that there is a way to tell that something is real, even though we can’t rely on our senses for perception. I’m giving you a minute to discuss with your partners what it might be.”
G considered it. She and Sereen exchanged equally confused glances.
Like a dutiful student, S started summarising Poe’s arguments but Gentry listened with only half an ear. She felt that behind all this over-thinking was a clear and simple answer.
She watched the professor walk along the aisles, tuning into one or another conversation before leaving each with a smug head shake of disapproval.
What was there to think about? Even if they didn’t see the world precisely as it was, something was definitely real, right? The chair she felt under her buttocks, the air around, the low murmur of the students. The annoying professor that… looked a little too translucent.
Gentry waited for the man to approach their desks and tune into Sereen’s musings. As he came so near they could reach out and touch him, Gentry did just that.
To her utter shock, her hand went through the old jacket and sent a wave of static over the professor’s figure, his whole form glitching and flickering.
Professor Poe was a hologram!
Unable to help herself, Gentry said, “No wonder you don’t think anything is real, Professor, you are hardly real yourself!”
The whole roomful of people stared, transfixed, at the surreal scene of a student’s arm disappearing into the teacher’s abdomen.
Gentry looked back at Sereen in search of support.
Was it laughter in her eyes?
Poe’s blood drained from his face, the mouth slacked open, twitching as if trying to form some words, but none came out.
Sereen chimed in, “You never told us you were a simulation, Professor.”
“Out!” Poe gritted lowly so that no one really heard him.
“I’m sorry?” G asked, innocently.
“Out of my class!” he exploded, jumping out of Gentry’s reach with an enraged grimace. “I am as real as you are!”
G stood up and looked at her hand then back at Professor Poe.
How much rage could storm in those watery eyes?
Then, she winked at her new friend.
“Let’s go then, shall we?” she said.
Sereen looked lost for a second, her eyes darting pack and forth between Gentry and Poe. Then, her gaze seemed to cloud a little, as if she retreated into her own head, but when she resurfaced, she nodded with a mischievous smile.
Both young women left the room, the classmates’ sympathetic silence and Poe’s angry seething seeing them off.
***
“What a way to start my first day,” Gentry said. “My hands are still trembling a bit.”
She and S were calming their nerves in the green winter garden, the soothing sound of the little running streamlet at their feet a welcome distraction.
“Believe it or not, his course is actually quite useful,” Sereen laughed. “Who would have thought the old Poe is actually not human? I guess we never thought of poking him in the stomach before. This is going to be the talk of the Academy for the next month or so!”
“Is it? I feel bad now. I guess I’m not getting any points for attending this lecture, right?” — Gentry checked her wristcomm — “It says “zero progress” and something else… ad.. Honi… adhonim…”
Sereen laughed, “Yeah, you adhominem’ed good old Poe, no wonder you got zero credit!”
“What does it mean?”
“You’ve seen the rules of learning and discourse, right?” S said. “There are no-nos, things that aren’t allowed, especially when it comes to Rationality classes and the like. Ad Hominem means an attack on the speaker, not their argument. It isn’t exactly what you did, but I guess it’s the closest thing!”
“Ad Hominem, huh,” G said. “Well, I guess I deserve it then. Thanks for standing by me.”
If it wasn’t for Sereen, G wasn’t sure she would be going to return to the Academy any time soon!
“You just chose a wrong course as your first class, G,” — no doubt about that! — “But another lecturer who works here is much more open-minded and he also teaches Rationality. I think you’ll enjoy him more than our old Poe. His next class is in a couple of days. Wanna come?”
***
DEAR GENTRY!
CONGRATULATIONS ON COMPLETING AN OPTIONAL ASSIGNMENT! 20 POINTS HAVE BEEN ADDED TO YOUR STATUS COUNTER.

I may have missed some more recent (late 2023-24) declarations, so let me know if I should add anything I've missed.
Stugotz personal record book. Sorry if the links are expired on some things. They're old.
[Time Stamps] Started to use them in late 2019. They may not be exact based on what podcast app or service you use. But they'll be close.
I DIDN'T ASK FOR ANY OF THIS:

FOOTBALL

(1) UCF is the 2017-2018 national champion.
(2) If Kirk Cousins goes to the Jaguars and not the Jets, no championship he wins will count in the personal record book.
Note (2)(a): Still pending sort of since Kirk is with the Vikings now – possible in future he could go to Jags.
(3) Eli manning has 1 ring. He doesnt get one for throwing a ball into David Tyree's face / Tyree getting a football stuck in his helmet.
(4) Carson Wentz has a Super Bowl 52 ring.
Note (4)(a): Foles does not have a Super Bowl 52 ring.
(5) The Raiders defeated the Patriots in their divisional playoff matchup in 2002 (Tuck Rule game), and then would defeat the Rams in Super Bowl 36.
Note (5)(a): In this scenario also, Bill Belichick was also "fired and looking for a job" after the Tuck Rule game and has 0 rings.
(6) If the 2017 Patriots won Super Bowl 52, James Harrison would not have a ring (Patriots lost to Eagles).
(7) Peyton Manning has one ring (Broncos ring does not count).
(8) Peyton Manning must give such ring he lost (above) to Von Miller, who thus has 2 rings.
(9) Aaron Rodgers can have all the rings he wants for keeping all of central Wisconsin employed.
(10) Brian Billick has 0 rings (2000 Ravens Super Bowl) because that defense carried him.
(11) Tony Boselli is a Hall of Famer.
(12) Tarik Cohen is an honorary Jew.
(13) JuJu Smith-Schuster is also an honorary Jew. L'Chaim.
(14) Drew brees has three rings for winning the super bowl for the city of New Orleans.
Note (14)(a): There was discussion on this where the number started at three, went up to five, came down to two, but it ended up at three.
(15) Mike McCarthy has no Super Bowl rings.
Note(15)(a): Dan also has this in his record book, and it is the first entry into the Le Batard Personal Record Book.
Note 15(b): In fact, McCarthy has -3 (Negative three) rings.
(16) Any Super Bowl rings Antonio Brown gets with the Patriots will not count in the Stugotz personal record book (9/9 Weekend Observations National Hour 2).
(17) Ohio State's 76 to 5 victory over Miami (Ohio) on 9/21/19 does not count.
(18) Due to Bill Belichick's 219 wins with Tom Brady, Bill's week 7 2023 victory over the Bills was actually his 81st victory and not his 300th victory.
(19) The 2002-03 Miami Hurricanes actually won the Fiesta Bowl/BCS National Championship game against Ohio State.
(20) If JJ Watt joins the Texans for the 2024 season or later on, none of the Super Bowl rings will count in Stugotz's personal record book

BASKETBALL

Kevin Durant
(1) If Westbrook wins a championship and beats Kevin Durant along the way in the playoffs, Westbrook will have won 2 championship rings.
(2) "STRAP IT ON BOYS, GONNA TAKE YA FOR A RIDE:"
Kevin Durant has 0 rings (Zero rings)
Kevin Durant has -1 rings (Negative 1 rings).
Kevin Durant has -4 rings (Negative 4) (As of 4/11/18)
Note (2)(a): This number is subject to change based on Stugotz altering rings to the "-4" current total. Specifically as seen recently when Stugotz adjusted the number from (i) 0 rings to (ii) -1 rings to (iii) -4 rings.
Note (2)(b): Here is a tweet transcript of the conversation where this was discovered.
Archive link
(3) If Kevin Durant wins an NBA title for the NY Knicks, he will gain 11 rings.
Note (3)(a): As seen above in "(2)," Kevin Durant has -4 rings.
Note (3)(b): [Math] If Durant were to remain at -4 rings, and subsequently win an NBA title for the Knicks, he will have 7 rings total. This was specifically stated (-4 + 11 = 7), and a question about a non-specifically stated Personal Record Book entry is posed below in "Note (3)(c)(i)."
Note (3)(c): If the Golden State Warriors had won a championship playing 3 on 5 with Kevin Durant, Kevin Durant would have 1 ring.
Note (3)(c)(i): [Confusion] I am unsure if "Note(3)(c)" means he would gain +1 ring, and therefore be "up" to -3 rings total. Possibly, Stugotz means if the Golden State Warriors had won a championship 3 on 5 with Durant, Kevin Durant would be at +1 rings total (Positive 1 rings).
(4) Kevin Durant's dagger in Game 3 did not count, because according to Stugotz, none of Durant's stats count. KD's official statline last night was 0/0/0 and the Cavs blew the Warriors out by 40.
(5) Anything Kevin Durant has done with the Warriors so far is not in Stugotz' personal record scroll.
Note (5)(a): Stugotz did not take his feathered pen and write anything in his scroll (King Roy approves).
(6) Westbrook has ALL of KD's rings.
(7) For every time KD says he doesn't give a BLEEP, Stugotz adds 2 "I do give a BLEEPS" in the personal record book.
(8) Per Dan, speaking on Stugotz' behalf, Kevin Durant has no Olympic Gold Medals (9/18/19 National Hour 1 @ 00:07:50).
Michael Jordan
(1) Jordan has 9 rings because:
(a) The Rockets have to give their 2 rings from 1994 and 1995 to Jordan (+2); and
(b) The Bulls would have won the 1999 Finals over the Spurs if Jordan didn't retire (+1; 9 total).
Note (1)(a-b)(i): Put LeBron's rings in a box and put Jordan's rings in a box. Jordan is +6 by the way over LeBron box-minus, despite box-minus sounding like a dumb stat.
(2) Michael Jordan was suspended for 2 years for gambling (Said 4/25/18 Hour 2, 14:30 in podcast).
Note 2(a): HOWEVER, MJ still has 9 rings as see above in (1)(a) and (1)(b).
(3) Any game Michael Jordan played wearing the uniform #45 does not count.
LeBron James
(1) If LeBron James goes to the Golden State Warriors, every Championship he wins will result in a deduction of 2 previously won championships.
(2) The Miami Heat LeBron teams were the GREATEST teams in the history of sports (5/7/18 Local Hour).
(3) The Miami Heat LeBron teams were also the MOST INTERESTING teams in the history of sports.
(4) If, after the 2018 NBA Playoffs:
(a) LeBron does not make it to the finals and the Celtics do; and
(b) The Houston Rockets do not make it to the finals and the Warriors do; and
(c) LeBron goes to the Houston Rockets for the next season, THEN
LeBron is allowed to win rings that count in Stu's personal record book.
Note (4)(a-c)(i): HOWEVER, Harden & Chris Paul - if they remain on the Rockets with LeBron on the team - are not allowed to have any of the rings won with LeBron count in Stu's personal record book.
Note 4(a-c)(ii): To quote the big man Stu (with Dan agreeing of course), "Do it on your own” (Dan agrees here).
(5) If LeBron wins an NBA Championship with the 2018 Lakers roster (as of 7/23/18), then that wins counts for 6 rings.
Note (5)(a): Thus LeBron would have 9 rings.
Kyrie Irving
(1) Kyrie Irving hit one of the biggest shots in NBA Finals History, but was only in that position because of LeBron James. Kyrie Irving, did hit one of the biggest shots in NBA Finals history that won everyone on that team a Ring, except for you (Kyrie). (3/9/20 Hour #3; Google Podcast @ 07:00).
Note (1)(a): Stugotz: "A little revision to the uhhh Stugotz Personal Record Book that I'll come around to writing...or Mike will." I'M WRITING IT YOU IDIOT MORON JACKAL
Misc. Basketball
(1) The Houston Rockets have 0 (Zero) NBA Championship victories.
Note (1)(a): See "Michael Jordan (1)(a)" for reasoning.
Note (1)(a)(i): [Restated Reasoning] Michael Jordan is actually in possession of those 1994 and 1995 Rockets rings because Michael Jordan would have won those championships if he stayed in Chicago.
Note(1)(b): [CONFLICTING HOT TAKE] Stugotz has also said Jordan didn't get the Rockets' rings because he was actually suspended for gambling.
Note (1)(b)(i) NEEDS CLARIFICATION PLEASE. Stugotz keeps going back and forth. In "Michael Jordan Note 1(a)," the opposite of "Miscellaneous Basketball Note (1)(b) is stated because he has gone back and forth on this issue.
(2) Steve Kerr has no rings as a coach. In fact, he has never even coached a game.
(3) Mychal Thompson (Klay's dad) has no rings. (Said on Zach Harper podcast).
(4) Clyde Drexler no rings (Said on Zach Harper podcast).
(5) Giannis Antetekoumpo is pronounced Yani Adababoombo.
(6) As long as James Harden has his beard, he cannot win any championships.
Note (6)(a): If the Rockets win a ring, then the ring goes to the beard.
(7) Lamarcus Aldridge cost the Spurs game 2 of the 2017 Western Conference Semifinals, even though they won.
(8) If the Sixers happen to win a championship, Sam Hinkie gets a ring.
(9) Chris Paul has NOT made a Western Conference Final since he had to join the Rockets to do so.
(10) Michael Jordan winning the NBA Finals in 1999 also means that Tim Duncan only has 4 rings instead of 5 rings.
(11) The Warriors only have 1 ring
Note (11)(a): Durant still has -4.
(12) Boogie Cousins cannot win a NBA Championship and have it count if he does so with the Warriors.
(13) Billy Donovan was the NBA Coach of the Year in 2017 (12/13/17 @ 28:10 Hour 1).
Note (13)(a): The Thunder blowing the 3-1 lead to the Warriors that year had nothing to do with Donovan. It was Durant's fault.
(14) The OKC Thunder actually did win the WCF against the Warriors in 2017 when up 3-1.
Note (14)(a): This does not apply to Durant though.
Note (14)(b): The Thunder also beat whoever they would have played in the Finals. Durant still no ring.
(15) Embiid has his 2023 MVP taken away and given to Jimmy Butler.
(16) Caitlin Clark's NCAA all-time scoring record still belongs to Pistol Pete because unlike Pistol Pete, Caitlin didn't do it in 3 years and she did it with a 3 point line.

BASEBALL

Babe Ruth
(1) Babe Ruth is black.
(2) Babe Ruth never hit a baseball. Not once.
(3) Babe Ruth is the number two black baseball player of all time behind Barry Larkin.
(4) Babe Ruth is NOT a top 20 Baseball player of all time. He's a pitcher.
Note (4)(a): However This is somewhat confusing/interesting because:
(i) Stugotz has said "Babe Ruth is the number two black baseball player of all time behind Barry Larkin; and"
(ii) This MUST mean Stugotz can only have 1 black player in his top 20 Baseball players of all time Barry Larkin; because
(iii) The only way this can work logically is if in the list of greatest players #1 through #20, only Barry Larkin is on the latter top #1 through #20 list. I would like some clarification on if he wishes to change this take/record.
(5) Babe Ruth is also not a top 20 pitcher of all time.
Misc. Baseball
(1) Stugotz has declared that in his personal record book, Baseball no longer allows pitchers to hit (Stated on 05/03/2018 @ 12:38:52 P.M).
Note (1)(a): Excludes Bartolo Colon, and Shohei Ohtani.
Note (1)(b): You are either a pitcher or a hitter. Not both.
(2) If the Dodgers won the 2017 World Series Clayton Kershaw would not have had a ring.
(3) Wade Boggs DOES have a ring because he rode around on a horse with a beer afterward.
(4) Clayton Kershaw did not win an MVP award because the award for pitchers was already given, the CY Young award.
(5) Miami beat LSU in the 1996 College Baseball World Series.
(6) The 1986 NY Mets did not win the World Series against the Boston Red Sox.
Note (6)(a): This "pains" Stugotz.
(7) The Red Sox retroactively winning the 1986 World Series may result in taking a ring away from the Mets.
Note (7)(a): Stugotz has to think about it though, he's not sure yet.
(8) Bryce Harper did not win the 2018 home run derby because he cheated.
(9) Kershaw's Earned Ring Average (ERA) is 0.00.
(10) Mike Minor (Rangers Pitcher) does not have 200 strikeouts in 2019. He's at 199 (National Hour 2, 10 mins 40 seconds in).
Note (10)(a): Chris agrees too. And who really cares (15% on poll do care).
(11) The 2020-2021 Mets, during the Coronavirus outbreak, are 0-3 and Jacob deGrom is somehow 0-1 with a 0.00 ERA and 1 complete game. The deGrominator. (Google Podcast 3/30 Hour #3 @ 19:20)

HOCKEY

(1) Ray Bourque doesn't have a ring.
(2) Alex Ovechkin may or may not have won the Stanley Cup against the Vegas Golden Knights.
Note (2)(a): "I mean he beat an expansion team . . . bunch of players nobody wanted" (We get the sense that Dan agrees).

TENNIS

(1) If anyone wins a major in Female Tennis without Serena Williams playing, it does not count and they have 0 rings.
(2) If Maria Sharapova wins a grand slam in which Serena isnt competing it doesnt count.

GOLF

(1) If Jason Day wins the 2018 Masters, it counts as an American winning (as far as bets are concerned).
(2) Vijay Singh did not play in the 2018 Masters.
(3) Steph Curry did not win the 2023 American Century Celebrity Golf Championship Tournament . Mardy Fish was the real winner.

SOCCER

(1) Lionel Messi is stripped of all his achievements for using HGH. He never played soccer. He is still 5'1". "Fraud."
(2) Soccer is dead.

NCAA DIVISION 1 WOMEN'S LACROSSE

(1) Rachel has more rings than Kevin Durant

MISCELLANEOUS

(1) Aqua?
(2) Rings plus-minus is the only way to measure greatness.
(3) The HBO Andre the Giant film was good, not great, and Stugotz didn’t learn anything.
(4) Benoit Lecomte (guy they interviewed) can not and will not swim from San Francisco to Tokyo in the personal record book because he is most likely taking a dip for a few minutes then coming back on the boat and enjoying some filet mignon by the pool.
Note (4)(a): "Do it without a yacht. And how about ya do it without the little magnetic field around you that keeps sharks away. How bout that. Allows dolphins through though? Anyway.."
(5) Justify (the Horse) only has a double crown.
Note (5)(a): This is the first ever double crown.
(6) Tango and Cash is in the action movie Hall of Fame. and Cliffhanger has the greatest 5 minute intro of any movie of all time.
(7) Maximum Security (a Horse) won the 2019 Kentucky Derby.
(8) Fruit Stripes Gum is NOT a 1st Ballot Hall of Famer in Stu's "Gum Hall of Fame." (08/12/2019 Hour 2 @ 15:25).
Note (8)(a): "It loses it's flavor so quickly"
Note (8)(b): Also, "[...] Bazooka...1st Ballot Hall of Famer." Also, "Big League Chew..1st Ballot."
(9) Chris Cote owns all intellectual property rights to the "Friends" (TV Show) Movie with a misleading preview that eventually has a climax leading to an intense murder mystery. (10/29/19 Hour #2 @ 03:15).
Note (9)(a): "If they make this without crediting Cote, they're stealing it."
(10) That guy killed the pigeon (12/10 Hour 3 @ 08:20).
(11) Billy owns the record for world's longest Plank (2/25, Hour #3; Google Podcast @ 30:55).
Note (11)(a): Possibly in just the Non-Marine edition.
(12) Zach Buchanan won a Pulitzer Prize for his story on the Madison Bumgarner / Mason Saunders rodeo fiasco (2/28/20 Hour #2; Google Podcasts @ 21:35).
(13) Findlay the Golden retriever holds the Stu Gotz Personal Record Book record for most tennis balls held in a mouth at one time by a dog at 6 (2/11/2020)
(14) Ace Davis (The kid who "proved" Tom Brady was cheating with science) and his fathefamily are heroes (4/1 Hour #3; Google Podcast @ 18:50).
(15) Dan did NOT do more push-ups than Domonique Foxworth (Dan did push-ups on a non-linear platform) (4/28/2020 Hour # 1).

SPORTS MEDIA DREAM TEAM™

Sourced from Google Podcast; 05/06/2020, Hour 2 @ 09:00
(Head Coach) Ernie Johnson - "When you look over to the bench, what you need is someone to stand tall, someone who is confident, someone who is competent, someone who has all the credibility -soaked in credibility - when you have the Head Coach of the Sports Media Dream Team."
(1; Point Guard) Mike Greenberg - "Doesn't really want to answer the big questions, but has no problem distributing those questions to other people who are happy to answer them."
(2; Shooting Guard) Stephen A. Smith - "Never met a topic he doesn't like. Short memory, doesn't care, Greeny could throw him anything and Stephen A. is gonna run with it even if he knows nothing about the topic. That is how it works. Stephen A. is the greatest of all time."
(3; Small Forward) Chris Fowler - "A do it all guy. Studio show? Great. Play by Play? Even better. Can do everything."
(4; Small Forward Replacement) Maria Taylor) - "Need Play by Play, need Sideline, need Studio Host - she can do it all"
(5; Power Forward) Dianna Russini - "You need some crazy, some don't mess with us, someone to tear someone's head off in the event that they come after one of us."
(6; Power Forward Replacement) PFT Commenter - "He just comes in and acts crazy, throws his arms and hair around, and give ya 5 to 10 really crazy minutes."
(7; In honor of the Chicago Bulls, Stugotz needed a Wennington, a Purdue) Scott Van Pelt - Dan debated whether or not SVP should be on the Sports Media Dream Team™. That's what he's doing.
(8; Bench Player w/ No Position Specified) Doris Burke
(9) Teased...

Edit: If you are going to comment on the length of this post, please don't. This is not a simple snark but rather an actual critical think piece about feminism and Taylor Swift.

Introduction

Pertaining to Taylor Swift, "Female Rage" has deviated from its intended meaning after Swift debuted a new performance of The Tortured Poets Department during the Eras Tour. Now, according to Swift's use of the phrase, female rage is interpreted as public backlash against Swift's dating choices rather than as a response to the broader injustices against women and women's rights. This post examines Taylor Swift's flawed feminism, philanthropy, branding, and the controversial trademark petition for the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical". Swift's background as an entertainer, indeterminate politics, and alignment with capitalism over feminism pervades her legacy, again threatening her public tolerance as not just an individual but as a brand.

Once Upon a Female Rage...

If you were cognizant in the early 2010's, you've heard countless jabs at Taylor Swift in the media. Magazines, radio, or online. Music critics did not take her seriously as a songwriter; parents put a woman on an unrealistic pedestal as the ideal role model for their children; she dated too much and used men as lyrical fodder. No matter the story, it inevitably spread, conjoined with everyone's respective opinions, and you'd be left to wonder, "Why does everyone hate this girl so much?"
Taylor's target demographic has always been young or adolescent girls, more so when Swift herself was one. She made music that spoke to the awkward misfit, cultivating a para-social relationship with fans on MySpace, then later twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where Taylor posted relatable vlogs showcasing the life of a homegrown American girl. Taylor had a delayed public "growing up" and, compared to her female pop contemporaries, Swift never "gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy" (and, apparently, never even had a sip of alcohol until she turned 21). She was more than happy to spin this narrative to allude to an inherent moral superiority above other women in the industry (Better Than Revenge, heard of it?), engaging in the very slut-shaming that she herself endured (the Madonna and Whore archetypes). The victim complex arose with the need to prove Taylor as a different type of pop girl. Based upon her holy and clean image, Swift had been dubbed "a feminist's nightmare", and that "[To Swift] other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability." Feminism and Tennessee-Christian country values don't exactly mix, it seems.
Years later, Swift befriended Lena Dunham and thus experienced white feminism osmosis, where Dunham taught Swift that real feminists defend rapists, makes insensitive jokes about rape and abortion, and prioritize all-white casts. Swift then declared herself a feminist in 2014, saying,

"Becoming friends with Lena – without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for – has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so."

I suppose the male-centric songwriting subject that permeates Swift's discography contained covert feminism and that we just didn't see that. Perhaps, the "Bad Blood" song and music video were written only in jest and not about poor Katy Perry, for Swift, as a feminist, would "never make it a girl fight" or tear other women down (though all Katy did was date your terrible ex-boyfriend and allegedly steal three backup dancers from your tour). In 2013, Swift said, in response to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's joke towards her serial dating, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
There was that time in 2015 Taylor said that Nicki Minaj was "invited to any stage [she is] on" (as if Taylor expects to have access to every stage, award, and platform that Nicki might not otherwise have as a black female artist...yikes!) in response to Nicki's criticism of the white + thin VMA nominations. Later, Nicki responded with confusion, as Swift continued, "It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..". Of course, this 'beef' was 'squashed' when Nicki performed with Taylor at the VMAs, with Nicki quite literally only having 38 seconds of stage time without Taylor. Maybe all that parading around with a legion of famous white women - similar to the way Taylor might've done with her numerous 1989-era handbags - was in fact a stance against gender inequality, and that this display of "girl power" should be enough to constitute Swift as a feminist icon.
Even while Swift says that Dunham informed her feminist outlook, she dances around the exact contents of those beliefs: "what she believes, what she says, what she stands for" is not exactly insightful towards what beliefs Swift might have inherited. Taylor never broaches women's rights topics such femicide, FGM, forced pregnancy & marriage, sex trafficking, women in slavery, women's financial and political oppression, women's educational rights, women's health, or women's autonomy, so we can assume she only gives a fuck about "girls supporting girls" (whatever that fucking means).
Despite some questionable (and sometimes vindictive) behavior, Taylor as a young woman did not deserve every media lashing that she received. We cannot deny that most headlines and criticisms perpetuated a misogynistic rhetoric which has plagued Swift for a majority of her career. Acknowledging events such as the development of her ED, her sexual assault trial, "Famous" lyric and MV depiction of Taylor, and the explicit Twitter deepfakes, for example, as both disgusting and unfortunate things that happened to a young woman in Hollywood does not negate the fact that Taylor is mostly a performative feminist.

Get Your Fucking Ass Up and Be a Philanthropist, It Seems Like Nobody Wants to Be a Philanthropist These Days

In 2013, Taylor Swift cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. The donation amount - $4 million - was the largest individual artist gift ever donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is, of course, mentioned on Swift's website. The two-story facility features three classrooms, an instrument room, and an interactive children's exhibit gallery. Swift also performed at "All for the Hall" charity shows and has donated numerous artifacts from her career (such as notable guitars, tour costumes, etc) to the museum.
This was over 11 years ago, and it is still the only notable philanthropic contribution Taylor Swift has made.
For a woman of her net worth and stature, and a woman who recognizes the difficulties for women in film and music, you would think that Taylor Swift might establish a scholarship program for women to study the arts or something. Perhaps Swift might even consider becoming a member of organizations that support female artists, or one that supports LGBTQ+ causes (since she is now proudly an ally), yet she remains superficial with her graces. Broader philanthropy, such as donating relief aid to Palestinian women or women impacted by violence and discrimination will probably never receive any financial support from Miss Swift because then she'd be using her money towards philanthropies involving anyone but white entertainers.
She even says herself in Miss Americana, "My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as 'good'." Well, she's certainly thought of as good, though her actions say otherwise. She's more than happy to do a vaguely altruistic song and dance for a clip-worthy interview quote and mass appeasement, then fuck off to one of her mansions on a 20 minute private jet flight, rather than actually contribute to anything pertaining to the causes she has endorsed. Yet, far too many people continue to give a woman such as her their money, time, and energy, and she hoards these resources to herself.

I Like Some of the Taylor's Songs, But What the Fuck Does She Know About Feminism?

Swift continued with her self-proclaimed feminist campaign, positioning herself as a political activist and LGBTQ+ ally in the Miss Americana documentary. The primary focus of the documentary consists of the sexual assault trial, Andrea Swift's cancer diagnosis, Taylor's ED and body dysmorphia, media scrutiny, and, largely, finally speaking up about her politics publicly, mostly her opposition to the 2018 Tennessee Republican senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn, and Blackburn's beliefs. Swift says, following a scene discussing her experience during the trial,

"I just couldn't really stop thinking about it. And I just thought to myself, next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you want to say."

We must ask ourselves, though: when has Swift ever spoken up to change anything? Okay, pulling her entire catalogue from Spotify because they didn't pay their artists enough and similarly pulling her catalogue from Apple Music are changes that she leveraged due to her revenue potential and power, but they are not pertinent to the average woman's rights. Moreover, these are issues that directly impacted Taylor's income, which was enough reason for her to protest in the first place. Swift has sold the most units for a female artist in first week sales, is the first female artist with 100k monthly Spotify listeners, is the first female artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy 4 times, and is the first female artist to do X, Y, and Z, all while being inoffensive and family-friendly to boot. The actual Taylor Swift seems unwilling to compromise the brand of Taylor Swift by contributing in meaningful ways to feminist causes, especially if it is for women outside of America and Hollywood.
The reason political anthems such as "The Man" and "Only the Young" of the Lover era feel disingenuous and corporate is because, well, it is. Taylor has taken every opportunity to advance her career or public image at the expense of other women. What is truly genuine to Taylor's outlook on other women is vying for male attention, taking down female competition, and vocalizing feminist injustices only if they directly impact her and her money. Some will argue that it's satisfactory for a woman with such a huge platform to even TALK about feminism, but that just isn't enough. It's even less impressive when you candidly look at the scope of her feminist lens: "If I was the man, then I'd be THE MAN", or "I really resent the ‘Be careful, buddy, she’s going to write a song about you’ angle, because it trivialises what I do", and, of course, "We all got crowns". Feminism, but only when it happens to me. It gets worse when you look at Taylor's track record of copying other famous women and removing other female artists as potential threats to her pop prowess.
It's good for PR to align yourself with certain blanket feminist and political beliefs, therefore good for branding, therefore good for ticketing and merchandise sales, therefore good for business. And Taylor Swift is a business.
She's not a feminist. Taylor Swift is a capitalist.

I Can't Pay Those Sweatshop Workers a Livable Wage or Benefits! How Else Would I Make My Billions?

Recently, Taylor's team filed to trademark the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical" after Taylor said during Paris N1 of the Eras Tour,

"So you were the first ones to see The Tortured Poets at the Eras Tour...or as I like to call it, 'Female Rage: The Musical'."

This trademark petition was filed last week on Saturday, and news comes about just as numerous unofficial fan-made merch designs have cropped up with this phrase plastered on Fruit of the Loom basics. I'm of the opinion Swift's team motioned for a trademark so that they can send out cease & desists to all those that make knockoff merch, which disrupts potential sales for Bravado, UMG's choice merchandising company; however, since it was filed earlier, perhaps Swift has bigger plans with the bizarre use of the gendered phrase. One Swiftie referred to the phrase "female rage" as "a funny Eras Tour joke". Could it be a possible fourth version of the Eras Tour Movie? Whatever the reason, the motion to capitalize off of such a concept is disgusting, but not unsurprising, for a woman that profits on her vain feminism.
Swift, through her company, TAS Rights Managements, has also trademarked over 200 phrases, including "1989", where she owns the property rights to this calendar year on keychains, phone cases, sunglasses, stationary, bags, beverage ware, clothing, entertainment services, your subconscious, and, of course, Christmas ornaments.
The vapid consumerism in Swiftie culture is, frankly, disgusting. Bravado's sustainability statement is non-existent, the quality control is abysmal, and the materials they use are horrible. The materials, such as acrylic and polyester, are made from petrochemicals. This means they are non-renewable, shed microplastics, and are quite toxic in production. The manufacturing process to make all of those lazy-rushed Eras Tour logo graphic tees is a huge blow to environmental well-being. Apparently, though, Swifties don't give a fuck. They sell out products in seconds and either have to face the manufactured scarcity or buy from a scalper that resells for 200% of the already ridiculous retail price. This doesn't include the environmental impact of vinyl records, CD, and cassette production, of which Taylor produces many variants that sell unsustainable amounts.
If we're talking about women's rights violations, why is no one acknowledging the women that work in the inhumane sweatshop conditions that have to pump out fugly t-shirts and hats? The millions of plastic microfiber dander they are inhaling, or the toxic dyes that touch their bare skin? Are they being compensated fairly for their skilled labour and are they in safe working environments? Do these women have minimal bargaining power, and do they have authority over their worker's rights? Is Taylor Swift female raging at their injustices? Does Taylor Swift ever feels bad that her wealth was built on the backs of women of color, disadvantaged by the demands of the global economy and garment industry? Do you think she ever says a little white feminist prayer for them before she goes to sleep at night?
What's even crazier is not that Taylor herself doesn't care, it's that Swifties don't care. There CANNOT BE ethical billionaires. You only make a billion dollars if you are exploiting other human beings for capital gain. Based on public perception of the possible "Female Rage: The Musical" trademark, it seems like Swifties are already asking for merch with this phrase. "If Taylor made it, I'd buy it." Oh, cool. So not only do you champion Miss Swift's avarice and billionaire status, but you also are unashamed to admit to your blind consumption of her music and merchandise, no matter where they might originate in production or sincerity. Just as Swift takes and takes and takes, Swifties' consumerism of Taylor Swift cannot be quelled.
The tortured artist's most vulnerable and sincere poetry...available now in 21 different versions!

I Am Tortured Poet, Hear Me Whinge

Look - even if Taylor's intention is to characterize TTPD as more "tortured" and "angry", the main thread of the album is "I was ghosted by my decade-long situationship with a controversial indie boy and my fucking stupid fans wrote a 'Speak Up Now' open letter prompting me to drop him" anger, which is adequately expressed in the lyrics and performances. The extent of Taylor's "female rage" on TTPD is on tracks such as "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?", which contends with relentless media scrutiny; "But Daddy I Love Him", where Swift firmly states she'll date whoever she likes no matter how "Sarahs and Hannahs" may react; and "The Albatross", a track mythologizing her reputation and the consequences of dating her. Of course, these coincide with deep psychological wounds that formed during Swift's early years in the media, and so, from her feminist perspective, these subjects tackle the misogyny and double standards that she faced.
Yet Taylor Swift still has no grounds to be claiming that TTPD best exemplifies female rage and therefore she, in the context of this album, is female rage incarnate. As the daughter of a stock broker and mutual fund marketing executive, Taylor was born into wealth and allowed privileges like trips and subsequent relocation to Nashville all so that she might get a record deal. Her father even invested at least $120,000 into the then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, which ensured Taylor's place with Borchetta after leaving her dead-end development deal with Sony. The fact that her parents were able to buy her a fucking brand new guitar for Christmas and pay for music lessons says so much about the financial security and safety of her childhood.
Money is privilege and protection, and despite Swift's experiences with misogyny and loser boyfriends, she does not know what female rage is.
Her rage is derived from her frustrations with her obsessive fans pulling the moral superiority card on Taylor in response to her rebound with Matty Healy. That's literally it. She's just pissed that the monster she created is no longer obediant, it's become a feral, sovereign entity that depletes the world of its natural resources and thinks it is more intelligent than it actually is because it's mommy has started to talk to it with big words. Apparently, 'illicit', 'elegy', 'nonchalant', and 'precocious' are considerably big words for the oafish monster, and I find it strange that this level of literacy is present in a group of fans that allegedly have GPAs of 3.5 or higher, but I digress.
Taylor Swift has never been one paycheck away from destitution. Taylor Swift has never experienced racial discrimination. She may have instances of gender discrimination, but she possesses the ideal white, blonde American beauty standard and therefore reaps the benefits of being a conventionally attractive woman. Taylor Swift has sufficient social capital. Taylor Swift is a billionaire woman prolonging her victimhood though she, as a woman, has mostly had control over her image and music (unlike her contemporaries). Taylor Swift is NOT entitled to be championed for her "female rage", nor should she be. Taylor Swift has never even been the struggling artist, for fuck's sake. I don't give a fuck if she's trying to fill the empty lunch tables of her past. Taylor Swift purporting herself, her unpolished album, and her lukewarm feminism as a musical bleeding with female rage is asinine.

Sigh Try and Come For My Job, Poors

Out there in the world right now is a 23-year-old woman, a recent college grad, who works as a barista. She has to wake up and get ready to go into a minimum wage job because she cannot get a job in her field. She doesn't have healthcare benefits or sick time, so she has to go into work no matter how she's feeling. All day long she is berated by vicious customers and creepy men, and, exhausted from being on her feet, she knows she has to go home to her shitty roommate that never does the dishes and her roommate's shitty dog. To comfort herself, she considers getting a treat, but thinks against it when she remembers that matcha lattes cost $15 and they taste like milky dirt. She knows that she needs to buy groceries this week, and so the woman resolves to go home, but notices that her gas tank is low. She goes to put gas in the car, but the pump stops at $27.86 because that's all that she has in her checking account. The woman, bereft and reeling, sinks into the driver's seat. "Well," she thinks, her head in her hands, "at least I don't have Taylor Swift's job. I just couldn't imagine."
Fame is somewhat of a choice. If at any moment Taylor feels that she is misunderstood, misconstrued, or overwhelmed by public opinion, she can LEAVE the public eye - Lord knows she has the retirement fund and residuals to do so. In "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart", the TTPD song about meeting the demands of your career-zenith mega-tour while in the relationship trenches, Taylor ends the song by rambling,

"You know you're good when you can even do it with a broken heart...you know you're good...and I'm good, cause I'm miserable, and no one even knows!...try and come for my job."

Yeah, obviously we wouldn't know, you recently passed the billionaire threshold and are the most famous and in-demand performer in the world right now. Taylor Swift makes an estimated $10 to $13 million dollars A NIGHT on the Eras Tour. Furthermore, the Eras Tour movie grossed $261.6 million globally, (which, as the producer, Taylor takes home 57% of the ticket sales) not counting the streaming revenue from Amazon Prime Video and the estimated $75 million deal that Disney paid to have it on Disney+. We're not even considering the income from cheap plastic popcorn buckets and drink cups plastered with colored squares in her Era-specific likeness.
It's funny. Taylor Swift often said that being famous wasn't hard, that she "isn't complaining". I'm sure it is difficult to always have to present in a good mood, else you'll end up misrepresented in the media, and I'm sure it's invasive to virtually have no privacy or semblance of anonymity. Still, Taylor Swift shows up each night of tour and performs. For a majority of her career, she has penned her sad songs while on the road. Most of "Red", her breakup album, was written in the thick of the Speak Now World tour. Now, some Swifties say they almost "feel bad" for attending the Eras Tour with Swift's revelations in this song, that they have had a 'dimmed experience' upon hearing Taylor's misery whilst performing. Despite the fact that Taylor said that "this was the happiest she's ever been" at Gilette Stadium in May, the lyrics "boohoo, woe is me, smile for the cameras and make the fans happy!!!" are jarring for Eras attendees.
While Taylor Swift was making double-digit millions a night in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and feeling miserable, Ana Clara Benevides Machado passed away due to heat exposure. The concert promoters, Time For Fun, are now the subject of a criminal investigation due to their lack of adequate hydration and safety. Taylor Swift cancelled the Sunday show that was to follow and offered VIP tent tickets to Benevides Marchado's family, which was a kind gesture, but perhaps incongruous to the incident of which they were offered as consolation. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but I'm not sure attending the very show at the very same venue that my daughter or sister passed away in two days prior, where the singer CONTINUED the show despite her death, would be healthy for closure.
There was no female rage at the show as Swift never saw Benevides Machado pass out. There was no female rage towards the disregard for fans as humans while Swift elected to proceed with her Brazil tour dates despite the country being in historic heatwaves (at risk of overheatting herself). If Taylor Swift was so shaken by touring with a broken heart or a fan's passing, she wouldn't have added an additional North American leg of Eras just two months after the Matty breakup. She's brokenhearted but willing to mend the cracks with your money and move onward with her worldwide female rage induced pillaging.
No matter what happens, even if you die at a Taylor Swift concert, Taylor collects a big fat check and flies away. She doesn't know you as anything other than a conversion rate or earning potential despite what her nearly 20-year long parasocial relationship with fans might otherwise indicate. She knows that, while some Swifties are without disposable income, they feel obligated to spend on a "48 Hours Only!" exclusive vinyl variant instead of necessities because they are so entrenched in Taylor Swift's intoxicating celebrity, they'll prioritize materialistic fandom before their needs. This is good enough for her because this means she can expand her real estate portfolio and finance her cat's lavish lifestyles. They're worth an estimated $100 million dollars. Her three cats could pool their net worth and solve world hunger.
While you and I might be denied bereavement leave and barely surviving the current political and economic climate, Taylor Swift has to, instead of gets to, perform for stadiums at full attendance for three nights in a row across the globe. You and I might be replaced by AI at our longtime jobs, but Taylor Swift is threatened with losing more and more money each time you listen to a "Stolen Version" of her songs. If we don't buy every variant of all of her albums, then who is going to pay for the fucking cats?
It is tone deaf to spend as she spends and lives as she lives in this economy, but this is her reality. She was able to donate $100,000 to all of her tour truck drivers, and that's wonderful, but it leads me to wonder about the ethos of the 2020s where one woman can hoard such life-changing amounts of money. Remember in 2014 when she gave a fan $90 ($120 in today's money) to get Chipotle because she had no fucking clue how much it cost? This is a 34-year-old woman who is increasingly out of touch with the reality for working class people and women in general. Normal everyday adults must wake up and go to their thankless jobs, and yet Taylor Swift, despite all her riches, incessantly references the lows of her life and career as a public figure and entertainer to farm sympathy and drive sales. And still, the corporate women have latched onto "I cry a lot, but I am so productive! It's an art!" as their cubicle battle cry.
Do you think that, from up in her private jet, Taylor Swift gazes at the world through her poetic, tortured eyes, and thinks, "All the little people, in their cars, walking, going about their lives...all those girls that don't support girls...do they know that I've made an album about female rage?"

Conclusion/TLDR

Thank you for reading. I would love to hear your critical insights towards this entire ordeal: TTPD, the trademark, the implications of it all.
TLDR: Taylor Swift is a bad feminist and is delusional to think that the TTPD eras set exemplifies female rage at women's injustice.

Disclaimer:
This post has heavy spoilers to the story of the version 2.2 and maybe to something else. Good luck to read all of this. I yap for Ena and maybe repeat myself little too much. Mentioned characters:
Sunday
Robin
Aventurine
Dreammaster
Bronya
Seele
Cocolia
Mentioned Aeons:
Ena
Xipe
Hooh
Long
Oroboros
Qlipoth
Mentioned organisations:
Beyond the Sky Choir
Astral Express
Family
In loving memory: Ena the Order “The one who transcends the many”
In loving memory of Tazzyrronth the Propagation “The Sand king”
In loving memory of the Great Tatalov “The Garbage King”
So, the original intent behind this post was to create a lot of puns about Order and Sunday (for example something like Golden Order Radagon Sunday, “I will have order” with Sunday and a falling train instead, Sunday working in a delivery and saying that someone’s order was cancelled).
But then I started remembering all parts of Penacony storyline that have fascinated me. And one particular part master stroked me. When Sunday used his “tell the truth or die in 24 hours voice magic” he used not the power of Order, but Harmony – the Path he supposedly deliberately left behind and betrayed.
How can I be so sure, that he didn’t use the power of Order, making it look like the power of Harmony? Well, nor Dr. Ratio, nor Aventurine, nor Welt, nor (most importantly) Robin didn’t notice any sign that the Order was used and that the power on display did in fact belong to Harmony. And mind you, all of them are quite clever, experienced and hard to deceive. And in Aventurine’s conversation with Acheron in the Horizon of existence, Acheron (who as Self-Annihilator isn’t affected by the illusions of Order and can see through them) referred to the brand, used on Aventurine as the “brand of Harmony”. And the last proof is that when Sunday uses this power, he makes a call (or if you are a pun enjoyer like me, “an order”) to Xipe, referring to THEM as “Triple-faced soul”.
So, this was a really long and a roundabout way to prove that even with his supposed devotion to Order, Sunday still remains the Pathstrider of Harmony (and the laws of the HSR universe dictate, that you become a Pathstrider by following a philosophy of a particular Path). While being a Pathstrider of two Paths is not called impossible in the game, and Harmony and Order mostly overlap, there are some key differences between them. It means, that Sunday to some extant still believes in a philosophy of Harmony and is not a complete devotee of Order, how some people could have believed.
So, the goal of this post is to delve on the philosophy of Ena and Harmony through Sunday’s story, words, thoughts and actions. And to make some obnoxious theories, but that’s later.
So, let’s begin!
Ⅰ
In his childhood, Sunday alongside Robin, was called by the Dreammaster “two best interpreters of the Great One”. That means, that as a child, Sunday was extremely close to the philosophy of Harmony.
Let’s remember what Harmony embodies as a philosophy:
“Then, they say, O you who have reached the end, enter into the paradise that envelops all! Join this great choir and feast, listen to the beating of billions upon billions of hearts, holding you in THEIR embrace...”
“To battle the brutality of the laws of the universe, intelligent lifeforms must discard their cowardly selfishness and the differences between individuals, fusing into one singular melody — to have the strong help the weak, and to protect life with death.”
That is what Harmony preaches and Sunday was a follower of this ideology. Harmony preaches selfless people not only helping and uplifting each other to build “the paradise” (a prominent theme in Sunday’s thoughts) bit also welcoming every other willing person. Harmony philosophy is about acceptance, forgiveness, cooperation, that no person is beyond redemption, that in every person has inside of them the force that genuinely cares for others and strives for good. Harmony preaches something like this: “Because if it is possible for every person to become a member of Family’s shared paradise, then we should at lest try to welcome them in it.” That’s why Harmonic Strings (Emanators of Xipe) are not people and are actually manifestations materialized as the responses to the Hive Mind’s demands. It is a seemingly naïve and romantic ideal for the sometimes and indifferent brutal universe of HSR that requires great kindness, compassion, understanding, belief in other people, ability to see the better in other people and uplift them. And Sunday-follower of Order reflects on that:
"When I appeared as a child, my speech, mindset, and soul reflected immaturity and innocence."
"As I grew into adulthood, I left behind my childlike side."
Sunday (as shown in the quest) was a person of great understanding, compassion, and love for other living beings, full of desire to protect them (bird, Robin, other people). He was able to embrace even the worst people if they would show even the slightest glimpse of desire to redeem themselves and change for the better, like people who allegedly sold their own children. It is notable that he both acts as a follower of Harmony and an enforcer of Order conspiracy because of these very character traits. The motivation is the same, just the choice how to act based on this motivation is different between him and Robin because of different experiences.
As the ardent believer of Harmony, the seed of doubt in his mind was planted ironically by the very followers of the Harmony -the Family. And the disillusionment about Harmony also began, when his belief in other people was tested. When asking Xipe to clear his doubts, Sunday asks three questions:
“Who can judge the strong when their power hides their crimes?”
“Who can vouch for the weak when they will pay any price to survive?”
“If "the strong defending the weak" is truly the foundation of paradise, then who is responsible for the suffering and anguish in this wretched world?”
The questions display that the preached Harmony doesn’t work as intended. The extremely hard ideal to follow was exactly too demanding for numerous people who couldn’t stand up to the responsibility that came with upholding it. Also, as displayed both in the main quest of Penacony and in numerous events and side quests, flaws and imperfections of Family(note: of the Family on Penacony) are numerous. We have an entire “Ode to Fool” in the Grand Theatre about internal bloodthirsty war between the Family, where two of the seven families of Penacony ceased to exist. When even Family: those who preach the Odes of Harmony don’t act as they preach, are not harmonious, don’t show compassion and forgiveness, it is extremely hard to still believe in its teachings. And from that, the belief in people starts to slowly crumble as the very belief in a possibility of a paradise preached by the Xipe, is tested.
That is what turns him to Order. The feeling that while the paradise of Harmony is theoretically possible, how much suffering must people experience before it actually arrives. And when will it arrive? And IF it will arrive? These doubts in human inherent desire to change for the better leads to the idea: “And what if they don’t change? Then why take the risks? Why not to create something that guarantees their safety, happiness and protection?” His desire for Order is still born from his love for humanity.
Ⅱ
And while the shift in beliefs did in fact happen, it wasn’t completed and some beliefs in Harmony remain, alongside doubts about the philosophy of Order.
To prove that, let’s remember the Grand Theatre part of the quest (“Everything that Rises Must Converge”).
Before that Dreammaster has a particularly interesting conversation with Sunday. Sunday not only changes their plan, taking Robin’s place in the plan and then he asks Dreammaster why Penacony was the chosen planet to bring “paradise” of the Order. If he was completely convinced, why would he pose these questions?
Sunday several times brings the part of 107,336 souls of the Oak Family in his monologues. Why? Because he uses them to give self-validation to his beliefs. It comes not only from his desire to grant “paradise” to everyone (and this guys as stated dreamed about the paradise of Order), but also from his self-perceived responsibility as the Head of the Oak Family to stand up to wishes and desires of his subordinates, to protect them, and as the man with greatest position among them, to fulfil the hardest task. Because if people he is in charge of follow and support his views, not only it gives him more belief in his set of beliefs(ha), but also gives him even greater responsibility to prove that their faith in him, in Order is not misplaced.
In first two acts he displays before us shortcomings of the Harmony, trying to display himself as the ardent believer of the Order:
In the first act “Ode to Prisoner” he says that the freedom was not really achieved in Penacony’s great Independence War, posing a doubt that the ideal of Harmony even existed in Penacony since the very beginning.
In the second act “Ode to Fool” the theme of not so harmonic Harmony remains. Sunday talks about internal civil war between the Family, that eradicated two of the seven families on Penacony. How “harmonic” it is!
But in the last and most important act “Ode to Order” has a surprisingly different theme, hidden in it.
It is supposedly talking about the future of Penacony, but there is something more if you listen to its content once again:
General: “Without a ruler who would protect the weak and fight back against the tyrants?”
Chansellor: “We must assist each other in protecting the weak, just as we must assist each other in opposing the tyrannical.”
This dialogue argues that the very measures Sunday preaches, are not required for the coexistence and unification are also an option. Case of how differently Order and Harmony solve one problem.
Jester: “Without a ruler, who will make the stars follow their paths, the tides rise and fall, and allow life to grow?”
C: “These things did as they will long before the ruler appeared, just as they will continue to do with rulers gone.”
Where the Order requires an all-mighty divine king, controlling the world (like God-Emperor of Mankind from Warhammer), Harmony simply says that actually such beings are not needed.
Minister: “However, now that we have bid farewell to our ruler. Who shall take their place?”
C: “We no longer require a ruler, for we were originally all rulers who stand above all things.”
Once again, order preaches about the ruler on the top of everything, the one who has all of the rights and makes all of decisions. But harmony doesn’t work that way. Harmony preaches that if every person has equal rights to enter its paradise, then they are essentially equal. Where Order differentiates people and treats them differently according to THEIR criteria, harmony does not as THEY are all-embracing.
The choice of the position of Chansellor as the one giving answers is deliberate. It is another innuendo on differences between Harmony and Order. In Order king takes the power and pushes everyone under his control. Chancellor, as the representation of Harmony in this argument, is a position not a person. He is subject to change, unlike king. Unlike king, Chancellor is chosen among the people, by the people. He serves as one man being the voice of many people, for they have chosen him as a Chancellor because their ideals are the same and thus, they have entrusted him to fulfil their ideals in reality in their stead.
Some people were not satisfied that the arguments were not posed against Sunday by the Astral Express. Well, this entire act serves as a counter to his arguments, showing the point of view of Harmony arguing against the necessity of ideals of Order. Most importantly, they don’t disprove hid arguments completely, but rather pose a possible alternative take on things.
The Clockwork doesn’t work on puppets because they are “satisfied”. But what gives satisfaction: Order or Harmony? In my opinion, Harmony. Remember: in THEIR paradise there is “peace bestowed, sorrows and strife released.”
The “king” in the text obviously refers to Ena the Order, and the last talk from the “Future” in the act is about “final rites” to the king, that there is no need to seek THEIR existence, nor remember THEM. It illustrates the final confusion of Sunday: if Ena didn’t fight back while being consumed, if the philosophy of Harmony prevailed in the confrontation among the Paths, why try to restore the Order?
And after that particular act he chose to reveal to us the finale of Ena’s story. That THEY were banished to oblivion by the united will of the people who defied Order. And THEIR death was praised alongside praises for the appearance of Harmony – the ideal that prevailed on Penacony in the end.
And that is what actually 3 is actually about. Puppets(Members of the Beyond the Sky Choir) ask what they and everyone else should do after the “king(Ena)” disappeared.
They feel no safety and out of their comfort zone when the one that controlled everything about their lives suddenly disappeared. And Chancellor’s answers are the representation of the ideology of Harmony, that you don’t need to be controlled to strive in life, for that there is more to universe and that the “king” is not actually required for betterment of society, that society can harmonize and evolve on their own, that the unity of people can replace the “king”. Ironically, “the Ode to Order” doesn’t glorify Order but rather disproves it from being the one and only universal truth.
In this act Sunday actually reveals, intended or not, that he doesn’t disprove Harmony’s ideal, that he subconsciously feels that it can stand on par with the ideal of Order.
Then, Sunday poses between us three questions, each one has different answers depending on your set of believes: order or Harmony. Notice, that Sunday doesn’t give his own answers to the questions.
“Is darkness equal to daylight?”
This question is very metaphorical. Radiance and light, eradicating darkness and giving protection to those under the light are a repeated theme in the ideology of the Order (“I shall ascend to the heavens, becoming the scorching sun. Bathed in my light, my people shall flourish, while all evil shall be eradicated” / “Those who live in the shadows do not bear the right to tread the illuminated stage.” / “I now permit you to gaze into the sun [hardest line in the game btw]”) But radiance is also a term sometimes used to describe Xipe. The greatest difference lies in the fact that what Order will not tolerate (“darkness”), harmony will be able to co-exist with and eventually embrace. So for Order they are different, but for Harmony not at all.
“Are sinners equal to the righteous?”
Order punishes the unjust and uplifts the righteous. For it, they are not equal. But for Harmony they are, mostly because before Xipe the very concept of sinners doesn’t exist. Harmony is all-embracing, for everyone can change for the better and be redeemed.
It is a discourse in philosophy: first question was about whether are you able to tolerate something that goes against you. While Harmony can, Order cannot (Sunday can as literally shown in the quest so he leans more to Harmony in that part). Second question was about whether people can change for the better and be redeemed. Order doesn’t believe in it, Harmony does.
“If you are born weak, which god should you turn for solace?”
It is another question to choose between philosophies because Sunday struggles to choose himself. If you are weak and you bow before someone(“king”) for the protection then this is a choice befitting Order, but if you choose to cooperate with others, uplift one another and “listen beating of billions of hearts holding you on their embrace” then this is the choice of Harmony.
Notice, that Sunday doesn’t consider us as enemies at all. As he says: “I genuinely wish to avoid a violent clash with my esteemed guests from afar.” When Astral Express team asks Sunday why did he invite us to the duel, he responds: “Because our shared goals give equal weight to the beliefs we strive for.” He regards everything happening more like a debate of two equally valid philosophies. Even in the fight with him (second one) he still invites us to join his chorus of Order. And he says “our final talk is concluded” only when he turns into his Embryo of Philosophy form, when literally everyone who could has risen against him. And then he reveals his true emotions:
“If your ‘paradise’ can save more people, sever my path with your hands”
He knows he is not infallible, that his plan can be wrong, that there is a possibility of making better choices, better decisions. And he asks us to prove, that Harmony after all is a stronger concept then that of Order. And his quote before that really makes everything extremely ironic:
“If we had never experienced solitude, how could we embark on different paths?”
Once again, this solitude refers to the times when he still completely followed Harmony. Yet he was the only person on the entire Penacony because of his great compassion, who actually followed what Xipe preached. Yet, in this he was alone. How can you be in Harmony with anyone, if you are alone. The irony is in the fact, that if Robin didn’t leave Penacony, of if he met another genuine believer, he wouldn’t have turn to Order and he would remain under Xipe. With many similarities of Order and Harmony: the epitome of Order is loneliness, being a sole ruler of everything, the epitome of Harmony is a unity of numerous people.
“And thus, my talk about Sunday has concluded. Next part is about Ena.”
Ⅲ
While his monologue about history of Ena can also be interpreted as parts above, it is much more interesting to discuss it when talking about Ena THEMSELVES.
“Let us commence with the dawning of the world… After the Dusk Wars, darkness veiled the sky, and chaos consumed the earth. Ena the Order emerged, destined to restore all existence. That marked the first day.”
The Dusk Wars are one of the most ancient (if not the most) periods of history we know about. Ena emerging at that time, makes THEM one of the oldest Aeons alongside Long, Hooh, Qlipoth and Oroboros.
” THEY gathered nebulae and forged them into picks, thus creating a grand lyre with black and white keys. Strike the white keys, and the sun rose. Strike the black keys moon and the rose. And so the cycle of day and night arose. That marked the second day. “
“THEY transmuted streams of stars into inked nibs, creating symbols to be pronounced and counted. THEY molded stardust into flowing rivers, assigning the righteous upstream and the unjust downstream. Thus, all things were marked and the world learned to discern between good and evil. That marked the third and fourth days. “
“THEY used the planetary rings to establish the law, forging a code of conduct among the masses. A grand lyre with black and white symbols of articulation and numerical notation took the form of musical notes. The downward-flowing river became a melody, and the cannon of law dictated the form. Thus, all mortals found their unique place within this symphony. That marked the fifth and sixth days. “
Ena, as we know was a control freak, at much bigger scale and extent, then Sunday could have ever hoped to become. We know that «Ena's harmonic songs seems to align within a three-dimensional framework, akin to an emperor maintaining hierarchical order among all creatures» Not only people, but the movement of celestial bodies were under THEIR control. THEY wanted to and almost controlled everything in the known cosmos. So, THEY were the only person responsible for everything. And when THEY were consumed, the manager of everything disappeared and the scales of order and discord lost their balance. That is why Hooh intervened and took THEIR responsibilities.
“THEY imbued world with meaning, perfecting all things in the heavens and earth. Then, THEY rested from the labors of creation. Yet, all beings cried to Ena – ‘Under the banner of the Order, you have defined all things in the Cosmos… but this made us realize that we are but puppets in your hands!’ – Thus, on that day, all beings united and cast the Aeon into the abyss of oblivion. That marked the seventh day. “
And this is the most interesting part. We know that Ena was consumed by Xipe, so why does Sunday refer to THEIR death as an action, made by humans?
As we know, Xipe “hails from multiple harmonious celestial words”, “a plural Aeon” and “THEY are the amalgamation of thousands of entities”. Thus, I pose that Xipe ascension was not a process of accension of a one person who somehow become an Aeon, but rather that several beings in a moment of unity (of “harmony”) were ascending as one. Next bit is purely theoretical:
But who could provide such unity before the existence of Harmony? Only the Beyond the Sky Choir – followers of Ena could understand the true extent of Ena’s control over everything and unify to create a change. Thus, mortals ascended into Aeon, befitting their shared beliefs, and from the Beyond the Sky Choir, Xipe arose with a new symphony of Harmony.
ⅠⅤ
Also, some other interesting bits from 2.2. storyline:
The most overlooked part of 2.2 quest for me is that part before boss battle when Sunday says that he doesn’t intend to either resurrect Ena or become a new Aeon of Order. While the actual possibility of such actions remains “enigmatic, we can now speculate that it could be possible to take control of a masterless Path or revive its master. I speculate that when we finally reach strongest Emanators level of poweallies/etc. the enemies we will be facing before actual Aeons will be unique beings like that: fallen Aeons in the process of resurrection or people in the process of becoming a new Aeon of a Path without one.
Another interesting bit of lore about Ena is that while she was “consumed” by Xipe, her Path still lingers in the cosmos masterless. While it was known about Paths of other fallen Aeons it is interesting that even assimilation by a broader concept Aeon isn’t enough to completely eradicate the Path from the face of the cosmos.
Some other connections that I noticed about Sunday while rewatching 2.2 quest were surprising even for me. Name a planet where the ruler intentionally left their subordinates in ignorance about the truth about the events for the sole reason of protecting them? It’s Belobog with Bronya and Seele (I could talk about similarities and differences of Bronya and Sunday but that would make already long post even longer). And this is why Ena was able to persuade Qlipoth. Because Qlipoth shares with THEM that general theme of protection. Because their Paths partly overlap. Because Preservation is about keeping everything dangerous behind the walls (in this case dangerous information about Cocolia), and everything inside the walls is safe, protected, or you could say “in Order”.
Ⅴ
P.S. I feel like in this quest there is still so much more to discuss(and I could write EVEN MORE), but this long wall of text is already too out of character from me as a humble follower of Enigmata.