feotakahari

A mutual talked about the ways their abuser tried to convince them they were inherently evil. Because I can’t process horrible shit without linking it back to fiction, I got to thinking about Torment: Tides of Numenera again, and I just figured out a really good way to explain what’s wrong with that game’s endings.

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I've been reading about this "Project Monarch" conspiracy bullshit, where people claim the government is making people multiple so it can use them as assassins. It sounds like the final and most powerful form of my Aunt S's brand of gaslighting.

What S currently does is divide . . . herself? Themselves? I've never figured out if S is multiple or not. But however you slice it, there are S'es that are friendlier, and there are S'es that are more hostile. One S will remember everything she hates you for doing. Another S will have no memory of any of that. There can always be at least one S who loves you, and there can always be at least one S who screams at you over the phone. But if you act more like they want you to, you'll (usually) get friendlier S's to interact with, and if you act in ways they don't accept, you'll have the hostile S'es to deal with.

This Project Monarch stuff divides you instead. Everything about you that the conspiracy believer loves, that's you. Everything about you that the conspiracy believer hates, that's your evil alternate personality that was forced on you by the government. So if they pare away all of your behaviors they don't like, and force you only to act in ways they approve of, that's a selfless act because they're saving you from the conspiracy.

It's too late for you to save anyone.




https://vgperson.com/games/endroll.htm




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For real, though, I actually do think fics about how women all want/deserve to be abused are more of a threat than fics about how how children all want/deserve to be abused. But that's not a property of the fics themselves! That's a property of bitter all-male social spaces that convince themselves women all want/deserve to be abused. Fics about abusing kids are less of a threat to the extent that social spaces that justify abusing kids are less common. (Existent and horrifying, but less common.) And I think fics about abusing women will become less of a threat if we can convince people to leave social spaces that justify abusing women. I don't judge or hate people for their fics, and it seems like people still write these fics even when they're in a healthier social circle and don't believe all that stuff.

A proposal: the value of law exists in negative space. Rather than it being a good or bad thing that there is a law, it is a good or bad thing that there is no law about something.

Let’s start with a society that has no law at all. If you hurt someone’s child, they can beat you up. If someone doesn’t like that you’re gay, they can beat you up. In effect, the unwritten “law” is not to do anything that annoys people who are capable of beating you up.

Now let’s suppose the society bands together and creates law. If you beat someone up, the community’s chosen enforcers will beat you up in turn. Assuming the enforcers don’t become corrupt (admittedly a big assumption), this is the “freest” possible society. No one is getting beaten up for their actions.

But someone steals your television, and you want to beat them up for that. So you pass laws against thievery and a few other things. Now, this is already butting up against other liberties, depending on what other issues your society has! If you’re gonna beat up thieves, you’d better make sure everyone has enough food to eat without having to steal it! But there’s a large amount of negative space, in that no one’s going to beat you up for being gay. I consider this the ideal setup.

Now you pass more and more laws against things you don’t like. It’s illegal to smoke pot. It’s illegal to cut hair without a license. The negative space shrinks, but it still exists. It’s at least theoretically possible not to get beaten up.

The worst case scenario is when enforcers realize they can beat you up, then put pot in your car and say you were beaten for smoking pot. The negative space is now gone, just as if you had no law at all. You can be beaten whenever the enforcers want to beat you.

The million-dollar question, of course, is how to keep the enforcers from being corrupt. I don’t have an answer, but it’s probably easier if you have fewer laws they can possibly enforce to justify beating you up.

(Another possible objection is that punishing you won’t actually stop you from breaking the law again. I can’t speak for every circumstance, but the prospect of getting thrown back in prison seems to be the main thing stopping my nephew from outright murdering my niece, instead of just breaking into her house and destroying all her stuff with his machete. I don’t know where he even bought that giant machete.)

The point is less “God is a hostile force” and more “there are people who think rape is God’s will, and those people are a hostile force.” Or “there are people whose response to their child’s mental illness is to try to beat the demons out.” Or “there are people who think women are unsuited to philosophy, because someone with good karma would have reincarnated as a man instead.” Or “there is at least one person (the Conservapedia guy) who thinks the parable of Christ and the adulteress was a later revision, because a truly divine entity would have righteously killed the adulteress.” Philosophy means nothing without linking it to real-world consequences, and there are all manner of consequences that come from “divine entities chose how this world would function.”

This just beat Majora's Mask, Oxenfree, AND The Sexy Brutale for best time-loop game I've ever played. (I've yet to play Outer Wilds.)



In four days, almost everyone in Elsinore will die, and you're the only one who remembers. They don't respect you, but they also don't notice you, skulking around in the shadows and overhearing their secrets. Can you make them listen, or will they dismiss you--for your race, your sex, your status, or their certainty that they know what they're doing? Which lives can you save? Which horrors can you prevent? And where do you want this story to end?

(I told my mother this is a game about having all the information and none of the power to get people to act on it. She said that sounded like her life.)
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I love the metaphor that Adora's abusive mother figure has scrying and illusion powers. No matter how far away Adora gets, a little voice can follow to tell her that she's weak and worthless, or show her visions of her friends mocking and condemning her. It's terrifying, but it's not real, and in the end, none of it has the power to hurt her. She got out. She's safe now.

Toga: Are ya drunk?

Sakaki: Hey, my daddy didn’t need to be sober to beat up kids, and neither do I.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/13091760/chapters/29950974