Finally finished Tyranny

via http://bit.ly/2Gm5vUY

So yeah.

Nate as an evil overlord.

Fits… surprisingly well?

Nate definitely has his dark side, even in Fallout 4. He’s very opinionated, and confident to the point of being arrogant at times. He’s only 22-23, but assumes he knows things better than most of the people he meets; although in his defense, he’s very gracious and apologetic when pulled up on that. And while in Fallout 4 he usually is loyal to the right people, I can really easily see him bestowing that on someone who is… less than great.

Most importantly, if he’s faced with a group he considers absolutely wrong (ie, the Institute) he will go completely Hellraiser on their asses.

So it turns out Nate being a Fatebinder of Kyros was a pretty good fit. The oddest thing is that being part of a larger group and having a structure to rely on, even if evil, actually means Nate is less fucked up than Fallout 4.

“We belong to Kyros, our lives are theirs above all else. To waste ourselves is theft from Kyros so by the Overlord, Nathaniel you are going to eat something or so help me…”

So Nate actually has a reasonably functional relationship with food in this world. Yay for evil armies and their rudimentary mental health services!

His backstory is a bit different but I’m really pleased I actually get to include trans!Nate in something, since it didn’t really working in Fallout 4′s backstory, and so far all he’s had is a little cameo in Bite Back.

Much like in Fallout 4, Nate’s born into a country that is very war torn. It’s only of the last Northern provinces still holding out against Kyros after the capitulation of Graven Ashe and the now-Dishonored. It’s been at war so long they’ve pretty much forgotten what peace is like, and everything in the country is pressed into service.

And unlike Kyros’ forces, they have definite views on how women should help the war effort. Basically by having as many babies as possible to fill the failing ranks of the army.

Nate was about eight years old when he realised this was what he was being intended for, and unlike Fallout 4 Nate, he didn’t try and tough it out, but sensibly ran away in the middle of the night.

He changed his name, lived on the streets as himself for six years. He didn’t really think about the war, getting closer every year, but just focused on staying alive and dodging patrols, and getting around the increasingly draconian laws.

After six years, his luck ran out. He was caught by the guard for stealing, and brought in front of the captain.

Who turned out to be his father.

Nate doesn’t like to think about what happened after that. He knows, logically, that his father was trying to be merciful. Penalty for theft was execution, and his father must have thought having Nate serve in the Mothering House would be kinder.

But Nate really, really would have preferred to have his head cut off.

And unlike Fallout 4, he can remember every fucking detail of the next four years.

At least he thinks it was four years. There weren’t any windows. Four births, anyway. He’d stopped speaking after the second. He’d stopped screaming after the third.

By the time Kyros’ forces finally broke through the walls and took over the city, Nate’s only thought was about the same as his Fallout 4 counterpart when he saw the bombs go off- oh thank fuck please kill me, I don’t care just as long as it’s over

As the forces took over district after district, soldiers came into the Mothering House and gave them weapons. Ostensibly for the women to kill themselves rather than fall into enemy hands. Nate looked at the blade, and his mind went- sort of red all over.

Years later, when he’s telling this story, Verse nods knowingly, “Yep, that’s what it’s like.”

By the time the Scarlet Chorus reach their district, the only one left standing is Nate. Covered in about twenty different kinds of a blood and carrying a butchered infant by the leg after he’d broken into the nursery. They are suitably impressed and take him to Tunon instead of just killing him on the spot- which is really not what Nate wanted and he’s screaming kill me the entire way there.

It’s probably not the most auspicious impression to make on Tunon the Adjudicator. Drenched in blood and demanding to die. Tunon is… well, it’s hard to tell behind the mask but the general gist is Not Impressed and he might just be about to quietly wave Bleden Mark to please kill this thing before it gets blood everywhere-

And stops. Nate still isn’t sure why. He looked at Tunon and it was like- the first real thing he’d seen in years. Like everything around them was just- the smoke that rose from his robes, and Tunon was the only thing that really existed. The one solid presence in the world. A fixed point.

Nate drew a breath, and started speaking. The first time he’d spoken in years and the words just broke out like a dammed river. Maybe he’d been saving the words, ready for this moment.

It wasn’t the best argument, stumbling and full of dead ends and confused examples, but the points were fairly well laid out and surprisingly coherent given the ending argument boiled down to please kill me and everyone else in this city.

But he must have said something right, because Tunon didn’t move as he staggered to the end of his recitation and- just fell to his knees as though the words had emptied him of everything he had left. He was crying, and pretty certain he’s about the die and please, please-

And Tunon looked at him. “What is your name?”

Nate blinks, because- they’d said his name when he was brought in. And Tunon keeps looking at him and it suddenly clicks and Nate swallows down a huge lump in his throat that isn’t just blood because oh thank you thank you he’s going to die under his own name. “Nathaniel.”

“Under Kyros, your name is Nathaniel.” And Tunon brings down his gavel on the word.

“Funny thing about Archon Tunon.” Nate explains as Lantry scribbles his story down, “When he lays down laws like that, the world changes in obedience. Maybe it’s just embarrassed to have been found fucking up so badly.”

Nate looked down at himself. And it was himself. He was very proud, he managed not to be sick all over Tunon’s robes. He burst into tears instead. His body was still a wreck, four pregnancies did that to you regardless of apparent gender. But it’s his, it’s his it’s his-

He’s not sure who takes him out of the hall. It might have been Bleden Mark, he can’t remember. He vaguely remembers having a bucket of water dumped over his head and being put in a room with a bed in it. He looked at the bed, and had no idea what it was. He slumped over and quietly passed out on the floor.

His first day as a Tunon’s Fatebinder started with someone accidentally stepping on him. Calio never lets him forget that one.

“It would have been a waste of resources to kill you.” Barik points out as Nate finishes his story. “Anyone who can kill a squad of guards with a dagger and make a legal argument in front of a court is worth preserving.”

“Well, yes.” Nate shrugs. “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? Whatever reason Tunon had, this is what he did. And for that, I’ll love him forever.”

Nate in Tyranny

via http://bit.ly/2GwbEzg

Okay, 90% of the reason Nate ended up in this game was because of that portrait. 

merelypassingtime: butterflygrl62: merelypassingtime: But, if one of the things that Thanos was...

via http://bit.ly/2IxFIwK

merelypassingtime:

butterflygrl62:

merelypassingtime:

But, if one of the things that Thanos was sooo proud of was that the Snap was fair and impartial, then did he himself have a 50/50 chance of being dusted?

And if he had, would the Gauntlet have dusted with him?

Man, we’d be screwed then.

And if the Gauntlet didn’t dust, how easy would it be for the remaining Avengers on Earth to just pick it up and undo the Snap?

Either way, Endgame would be so much shorter…

My question is - if he dusted half of everything alive - never heard it was limited to humanoids, did he remove half the vegetation? Animals? Fishes? The goal was to half the population so they had twice the resources to survive. But if the snap eliminated half of the crops….

Yeah… That’s a good point.

Thanos is not one of the great thinkers of our time.

No wonder facing down Tony scared him. ;)

Not only that, but a surprising number of plants and animals rely of symbiosis with other creatures to survive. many plants wouldn’t be able to survive without the fungi around their roots helping them to filter minerals. Humans would starve to death without our gut bacteria.

Basically, whatever survived the snap would probably die anyway.

there was a post going around saying ""dldr is meant

via http://bit.ly/2vez5GY

… phew. this ask almost passes as a legit question, but the ‘xoxo’ at the end is a little much.  still, what a great opportunity to talk about this ongoing problem of people ignoring warnings that a work contains content that upsets them, then complaining that they were upset when they viewed it.

(first, a side note: don’t censor the word ‘pedophilia’. It’s not a slur - it’s a content warning. If you censor it, the blacklists of people who don’t want to see posts that mention pedophilia won’t catch it and they could be harmed. Just use the word.)

anti-shippers who look at a fic or fanwork’s tags and say ‘this has problematic content! I better go tell the author how problematic their content is!’, I have news for you:

warnings on fanworks indicate that the person creating the work knows the content is ‘problematic’, not for all audiences, and may hurt people if they view it unsuspectingly. stop taking fanwork warnings and tags in bad faith and using them as an excuse to harass and harm creators.

warnings aren’t ‘disclaimers’ (and aren’t used as such). they’re the CONTAINS NAPROXIN. KEEP OUT OF REACH OF CHILDREN sticker on painkillers. The content is good, even helpful, for some people, but for others who don’t need it or are too young to understand what they’re consuming could be harmed. take the warnings seriously and if you don’t like what they say the fic contains, you really are better off not reading/viewing it!

‘they’re not warnings, they’re advertisements!’ they can function as both! people who want to read that content can find it and people who don’t want to read that content can avoid it. everyone is happier, except anti-shippers who are mad that people are enjoying content they don’t personally approve of.

‘If the creator knows their content is problematic, then they shouldn’t have created it in the first place! Or if they did, they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see!’ well that’s a very different conversation. What you’re saying is that you advocate for censorship, and in that case ‘don’t like don’t read’ would be worthless: only things you like would be allowed to exist in the first place.

But let’s talk about how ‘they shouldn’t have put it on the internet for people to see.’ the basis for this is, I know, that it could corrupt the unsuspecting youth who read the bad content. But isn’t this a bit contradictory? if a fanwork is tagged with a warning that it contains abuse, everyone who looks at the fanwork is going to know that 1) the author believes that abuse is bad and needs to be warned for, and 2) the work contains abuse. Taking these points together, no matter how positively the abuse is depicted, a viewer has foreknowledge that it’s abusive and the creator thinks abuse is bad.  It’s simply insulting to imply that viewers will look at the abuse in the fanwork so uncritically as to not think it’s horrible after receiving such a warning.

In fact, I’ve heard anecdotal evidence that people who have been raped or abused (or still being abused) or undergone other harm have read fics with these warnings and because of the warnings, realized what had happened to themselves was not okay.  If anti-shippers had their way, those fics wouldn’t even exist, much less be warned for.

I’m about to say something radical, so brace yourself: 

because tagging warnings is the accepted way to warn people about dangerous content in fandom, the things more likely to cause confusion and harm in fanworks are the things that aren’t warned for.

Even the most positive depiction of abuse would be spoiled by a warning. Can you imagine if the beginning of every copy of Nabokov’s Lolita started with ‘Warning: this work contains depictions of csa, abuse, and child grooming.’ It would force readers who are blind to the hints that the narrator is unreliable to read the work with a very different eye, and I doubt most people would read it and conclude it’s a love story the way many people do today.

Now Lolita was intended to be a kind of monster story from the point of view of the monster - it was never meant to be a positive depiction at all. Nabokov’s work was too subtle for most people, but he was a master storyteller. I think if he could, he’d go back and add a warning so people would stop getting the wrong idea.

In fandom, where we have a widely-accepted tagging system, potentially harmful content that the creator adds deliberately will be warned for. But the potentially harmful content that the creator doesn’t know about won’t be - and that’s the stuff that tends to be a lot more sneaky and insidious.

Let’s take your example: 

“i can be as racist as i want and you have to deal with it because i used a disclaimer".

Racism does crop up a lot in fanworks, but not in the way this implies.  There’s a huge difference between a creator recognizing racism exists and utilizing it as an aspect of a setting or acknowledging it in a respectful, truthful way and a creator who does not recognize their own racist blind spots and therefore ends up perpetuating harmful stereotypes or providing racist narration without realizing it.

The former tends to be warned for; the latter never is because the creator doesn’t even know they’re being racist. The former may be painful, because racism is shitty and harmful and real, but a person can steer clear if they want to avoid it and the warning shows the content is known to be bad. The latter is more painful because it’s not just depicting racism: it is in fact perpetuating racism.

So which is actually worse: the fic that has a warning for racism or the fic that doesn’t?

And this can be applied to anything. A fic that depicts a character being abused but doesn’t warn for abuse tells me that the author doesn’t know the work contains abuse (which is worrying for the safety of the author). A fic that contains dubious consent but the author doesn’t warn for noncon/dubcon/rape tells me that the author has a poor understanding of consent.  These are the fics that are more likely to be dangerous. Fics without content warnings are also the ones most likely to unironically and uncritically depict the bad behavior in a positive light - because the authors have been taught by the rest of society outside fandom that what they’ve depicted is normal/not harmful. They are victims, and they need help, not people yelling at them about how problematic they are.

Two last notes, which I’ll try to keep short:

If a fanwork depicts a relationship that’s canonically unhealthy in a world where it’s fluffy and healthy, they are not responsible for putting warnings on their fic that pertain to the canon version of the ship.  For instance: Kylo and Rey are enemies in current Star Wars continuity and Kylo tried to torture Rey for information. But if a fic is set in a future where Kylo is well-adjusted and happy and dating Rey in a non-abusive relationship, the fic does not need to warn for ‘abuse’. the fic doesn’t contain abuse. Let it go.

No creator is beholden to using anti definitions of words like ‘pedophilia’, ‘abuse’, and ‘incest’ for their warnings. The definition of what antis call ‘pedophilia’, ‘incest’, and ‘abuse’ varies from fandom to fandom - sometimes from pairing to pairing. While tags will always be somewhat subjective, the wide variety of definitions these words have in anti-shipper parlance makes them all but meaningless, so use them when you see fit, not when antis demand it.  If antis have a problem with it, they’ll just have to start treating ship tags as warnings* and avoid all depictions of ships they don’t like. (which is what we all wish they’d do anyway.)

And now for the final irony: every time anti-shippers use warnings as a reason to go yell at people about how their fanworks are bad, antis give creators less incentive to tag warnings. People might start to hope that if they just don’t warn up front for the potentially dangerous content people will stop yelling at them without even looking at the work itself. Or if the work is borderline (’maybe this is abusive but maybe it’s not’), they may opt to go without the warnings so they can avoid the extra trouble. this is already happening with dubious consent depictions. If a noncon warning gets you yelled at, then fics where the consent isn’t completely denied will just not get warned for at all, and that’s fucked up.  And when the warnings aren’t there, people are way more likely to stumble on something of a nature that upsets them! 

So as usual, in their crusade to eradicate all content that isn’t unquestionably wholesome and pure antis make everything a little less safe for everyone. Thanks, guys.  (please stop.)

and creators: please, depict terrible things in your fanworks in whatever light you choose - and warn for them. you might accidentally help save someone from a real situation that’s terrible.

*ship tags also work as both warnings and advertisements, as it happens. Funny, isn’t it?