Hufflepuff that loves a lot of things; silver perm head samurai and fictional dragons, school idols and personified swords. Also loves her cat to ICKLE WITTLE BITS.
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Currently reading/watching: The Raven Cycle, GINTAMA
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Very fun thing actually about Jin Guangyao is he spent so much time and energy passing himself off as normal. The Normalest Guy, Look How Normal I Am. The Very Best And Most Skilled At Normal Things, Like Being Normal And Having Normal Opinions.
Which is great because on the one hand it reflects how he was kind of aware he absolutely was not. (And that by default this isolated him and this was Very Unsafe.) But on the other you see, with all the times he falls into the typical mind fallacy under stress and projects weird shit onto people, he also on some level believed everyone was doing this.
That being a Normal Person who had Normal Reactions to things, like being appalled by brutal violence, was an elaborate social lie everyone had to maintain to keep up the facade of civil society, and actually everyone was basically the same as him deep down. He was just better at it, and also the smartest.
Which is a very long way to say his character arc is heavily tied up with his evolving relationship with and skills at masking. I’m not gonna armchair diagnose him because that’s beside the point, the point is that he is trying so fucking hard to be normal, but without a particularly well-developed definition of what’s abnormal about him to begin with, resulting in some misfires.
And then you contrast him to some other characters and it gets more fun. One of his direct foils is Nie Mingjue, who literally does not know how to mask at all, not the slightest bit, but is fortunate enough to have been born the exact kind of weirdo his position in life demands, with special interests in ‘saber training’ and 'destroying evil.’
(He explicitly, per narration from wwx being inside his head, has no other interests and doesn’t really understand the idea of having more than one activity you care about, do not tell me Nie Mingjue is walking around with a normal brain.)
So he is (jgy has a point about this, although he actually makes it about the luxury of having moral compunctions) free to totally embrace the conviction that everyone should basically be their authentic selves at all times, and just not do evil things about it.
On the other hand, and this really illuminates their relationship for me, Lan Xichen is absolutely trying to be normal. Like, he does try to excel, he wants to be best and he knows he’s good, but as a person he is also trying to be as normal as circumstances allow.
He understands 'being normal about things’ as a goal not in jgy’s terms as an elaborate social fiction but as aspirational shaping of the self; if everyone is normal about everything then there won’t be needless conflict. Living as normally as possible will optimize your mental health and your respect for others, and it’s just a good baseline from which to be good.
Which is fine as far as it goes, but means harmless eccentricity (including gay) is to be tolerated and swept under the rug rather than really supported, and prejudices him to instinctively side with Jin Guangyao and anyone else who is pushing for Let’s Be Normal About This, even when the people being weird are in the right.
(This is also to a non-zero degree a trauma response behavior; what Lan Xichen experienced as the largest existential threat to him growing up was something along the lines of being perceived as a selfish disruptor of norms, like his father.)
And then contrast that to Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji, who are both very concerned at least initially with how things and people and they themselves are supposed to be, and feel some responsibility for ensuring this supposed-to is reflected in reality.
But neither of them makes any particular attempt to be normal about it.
And then ofc Wei Wuxian, another jgy narrative foil, never attempts to pass himself off as normal. He will sell 'I’m better than everyone ever’ and 'I’m scum of the earth’ in the same breath before he will try for normal.
Except that he genuinely seems to think his most virtuous traits, his throw-himself-between-victim-and-weapon impulses, are basically normal. If not everyone (who isn’t a total shithead) does it, it’s because not everyone has his insane confidence they can pull it off.
Which in a good mood he would say is fair, because he is in fact awesome and really good at winning. (In a worse state of mind he would definitely hate on all the selfish cowards.)
Nie Huaisang is probably the most genuinely normal human being in the main cast, probably even more normal than Jiang Yanli, and he’s very happy to play that up and present himself as actually even more normal and average than he is, in order to keep expectations down.
Up until his whole life gets fucked and this little pretense turns into the most elaborate and successful mask in the entire book.
“Never thought I’d read a story that so effectively captures why life in a broken system is worth living”
“I grew up in Iraq. When people hear this in the US, where I now live, they usually say: "Wow…that must have been hard.”
I mean? I guess? I’ve been a couple hundred meters from ISIS bombings. The government is spectacularly dysfunctional. You never know when the electricity might be on. Most summer days are 50 C. The tap water is salty.
And I also love the wonky little generators people wire everywhere. I love the weird shark statue with Saddam torn off the top. I love the guys fishing in the river despite the fact that it’s greenish black. I love how excited everyone gets about the government building one tiny new overpass. I also love the random overpass sitting in the desert connected to zero roads. I love hearing our friend giggle as my dad ribs him for driving a Toyota Hilux, a favorite of terrorists transporting weapons. I love the stray cats that carefully pick their way over the barbed wire on our walls. I love the people that run towards a bombing instead of away because they want to help the survivors. I love the guy who fixed my glasses with a wrong-sized screw because he lived through sanctions and doesn’t need dumb things like correctly-sized screws.
But it’s almost impossible to explain this to most Americans. They picture a normal Iraqi life and think it would be their worst nightmare. So I’m used to just not sharing that part of my life, or ever seeing it in media.
So this game totally caught me off guard. We’re in a setting in between apocalypses, starring an alcoholic fuckup from a corrupt occupier-aligned police force, who at best might keep a couple people from dying in a gang war. It’s pretty bleak. It’s also incredibly fucking joyful.
Just the prose alone is so sincere. You can’t write stuff this goofy, flowery, beautiful, dumb, and moving ironically. The writers clearly love words far out of proportion to how much they might be able to actually change fundamentally broken systems.
And all the characters, the worldbuilding details, the interruptions from Shivers and Esprit de Corps, hell, all the bits and pieces of your brain. There’s so much attention and thus so much love everywhere in this game for humans and what humans do. Doesn’t matter if they might all get shot, blown up, or wiped clean by pale in a couple years. Doesn’t matter if they brought it all on themselves. Right here, in this moment, they are human, and so they matter.
I feel like this game gets why my life in Iraq was worth living. Even if a lot of my fellow Americans think the world sure would be nicer and simpler if Iraqis just didn’t exist.
I thought I had signed up for a fun 20-30 hour diversion, not the feeling of being loved?!“ /End ID]
fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes
May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love
“In one of the most notable moments in sports history, Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped thinking he had completed the race.
A Spanish athlete, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him, and after realizing what was happening, he started shouting at the Kenyan for him to continue running; but Mutai didn’t understand his Spanish. Fernandez eventually caught up to him and instead of passing him, he pushed him to victory.
A journalist asked Ivan, “Why did you do that?”
Ivan replied, “My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.”
The journalist insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?“ Ivan replied, "I didn’t let him win, he was going to win.” The journalist insisted again, “But you could have won!”
Ivan looked at him & replied, “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of that medal? What would my Mom think of that?” Values are transmitted from generation to generation. What values are we teaching our children? Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways to WIN.”
also im growing to hate the phrase “hold accountable” in discourse because its always so…. empty? like you see people saying “sure this person apologized, but we need to hold them accountable!” like cool. what does that mean. how can you get any more accountable than a public apology. do you want them to apologize… again? more? get a tattoo explaining their crimes so everyone they meet is informed? do you want accountability or are you repeating buzzwords because you cant find a nice way to say you just want them to disappear.
If safety in your ideal society is entirely based on care by networks of affinity, and does not provide care for people who are not liked by anybody, then your society is actually even worse than the situation we are in now.
Pissing off people close to you or over-exhausting your social network or isolating yourself is often an inherent part of many mental health problems, addictions, etc. By the time people need care the most, they have often lost all their networks of affinity, and with some bad luck, any of us could find ourselves in that situation.
There has to be unconditional care available for the more unlikable of us, or there isn’t really a safety net for any of us.
The thing that concerns me the most is that the people I see arguing for only informal/community support networks are often in communities that have a lot of interpersonal drama and poor conflict resolution skills. So it’s like…this should be your primary support network, but also people get excommunicated on a regular basis? That’s a terrible idea for everyone involved. People who have caused harm still deserve help, and people who have been harmed deserve the ability to set boundaries and remove people from their lives in ways that aren’t sentencing that person to losing all their options for basic support.
when setting a boundary comes hand in hand with sentencing someone to a slow and painful death by isolation and neglect, setting boundaries becomes incredibly frightening and painful for everyone involved. help should be available to everyone, free of charge and judgement, no matter how bad they fucked up.
Yeah. Like, this is also necessary from the caretakers point of view.
How many of us are stuck accepting kinda shit, maybe even abusive, behavior from our elderly parents because they would literally die without us? How many are not setting boundaries because while a person is very shitty to us we still love a part of them and we don’t want them to die?
Safety nets of unconditional care also mean none of us are individually forced to care for someone who is uniquely toxic to us.
When conservatives say that the poor should be cared for entirely through personal charity and not government support, this “networks of affinity” model is exactly what they mean.
Also, they’re perfectly happy with these “networks of affinity” when it comes to college (legacy admission, admission by recommendation, etc.) and employment (“networking”).
ALT