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GLOSSARY This links to a post on the free section of my Patreon. Note: "Book 1" is chapters 1-59, "Book 2" is chapters 60-133, "Book 3", is 134-193, "Book 4" is CH 194-(ongoing)
The vastness of the ocean was hard to understand until you truly saw it. Kazue mused upon this thought as she and Moriko walked slowly along the beach of this port city. It was the third and last day they would be spending here before they moved on. Since they had left the capital, they had been much more careful about how long they lingered in any one location. Most places they gave no more than one non-traveling day to, but this city was Kazue's first visit to the sea, and there was much to see and learn here.
Though somewhat surprisingly, neither of the spirits she currently had bonded to her related directly to the sea or sand, or other such ocean themed concepts. The first of them was a rather esoteric, ephemeral entity; a creature of light and shadow, of liminal places and the borders between. Kazue still didn't know why this was the spirit that responded when she was seeking a solution to how the sun readily burned her skin, but she suspected it had more to do with the light and shadow aspects than the liminal aspects, even if these things weren't entirely separable. And it had provided her with the spell she needed.
Of course, the reason she needed it was that Moriko had insisted they buy dresses in the local fashion, though Kazue had insisted that Moriko join her in wearing the short pants that were commonly paired with the lightweight dresses that barely fell to mid-thigh. The fabric was thankfully thicker across the chest because it was borderline sheer in other places, and it was only held up by a thin pair of straps for the shoulders.
And this exposure was no doubt a good portion of why Moriko had insisted on such flimsy casual wear. Not that Kazue had much to complain about, as it did give such a wonderful view of her wife's legs and the way the sun shone on Moriko's skin as the muscles beneath flexed. Yum. While the wide-brimmed hat that Kazue was wearing did make it harder to look up to see people, it did help hide her gaze when she wanted to admire her wife's figure discreetly.
That figure had been such a beautiful sight last night, when Moriko had recklessly chosen to dance in the air with the thunderstorm. It had been both enthralling and terrifying to watch the half-elf laughing almost maniacally as she leapt across the sky; wind, rain, and lightning swirling about her lithe form. While Kazue might have been able to pull together enough spells to enable her to at least join her wife up there, it wouldn't have really been dancing the same way. Kazue would have been moving despite the elements, not with and because of the elements, and she would have had to put a lot more effort into ensuring that lightning didn't strike her.
Not that Moriko was immune to a direct hit from a natural bolt of lightning, no, the reckless woman was entrusting to her control of the elements to keep such a strike from hitting her.
But if Moriko hadn't gone out to dance in that storm, Kazue wouldn't have met the second spirit she was keeping bonded right now: a spirit of lightning and storms. While not so esoteric as her liminal spirit, it could be almost as ephemeral. She knew that they would continue to exist as discrete entities so long as they were bonded with her, but they were the sort of spirit that might otherwise dissipate when conditions were no longer optimal for them. Especially the liminal one; Kazue thought it might have come into existence because she'd been putting effort into finding something that could help her out.
What she was hoping was that if she could keep them bonded long enough to give them a stronger sense of identity and self that they'd be able to exist independently. It was limiting for her to keep them bonded; she could only keep two bonded at a time, and it took several minutes under optimal conditions to bond with a new one. But she didn't mind and thought that her liminal spirit worked really well with her ability to bring dreams and imagination briefly to the surface of reality. Her trick for making it briefly hard to tell where she was as random images of might-have-beens flickered around her could be amplified along the edges of spaces, letting her slide through reality a bit more. She could move further so long as it was along a border and squeeze through gaps she otherwise shouldn't be able to fit through.
Her lightning and storm spirit did not synergize quite so well, though it could speed her up and that did help, and its bolts of lighting were probably her most powerful ranged abilities at the moment. But she hadn't had a good chance to test it out yet, not inside of city limits. But maybe tomorrow while they were on the road.
For now, Kazue was listening to Moriko recount yesterday's events back home.
"So after breakfast, Mordecai tormented the kids by waiting a while before asking if there was anything that wanted to talk about. Then he just nodded thoughtfully when they spoke and asked things like 'is there anything else?' while smiling patiently and encouragingly. The two of them spilled their guts." Moriko was having trouble not laughing while she recounted the tale, and it made Kazue grin.
Nothing truly inappropriate had happened, but it they were at the edge of different social rules. There was a difference between the three of them sharing a room with well-understood rules, and very different for one of them to spend the night in the other's private room. And it certainly wasn't the dungeon's place to 'punish' them for any sort of indiscretion, perceived or otherwise. But as the adults in charge of the area, it certainly fell to them to help encourage a healthy amount of responsibility. Thus Mordecai 'forcing' Derek and Shizoku to tattle on themselves and explain exactly why that wasn't supposed to happen.
Moriko continued happily, "After he'd gotten them to give themselves their own guilt trip, Mordecai gave the pair heavy head rubs and laughed at them before letting them know they weren't in any trouble. His only real concern was responsibility, and he thought that they were both pretty responsible overall but that going forward they should be more careful. He didn't say it directly, but he implied that being responsible might be harder as time went on."
Which was a pretty fair assessment. The Azeria clan worried about it a lot less than even other kitsune clans as all pregnancies were causes for celebration and there was plenty of support for the girl without a need for the father to be in the picture. Kazue had no illusions that this meant her clan was some bastion of enlightenment. Part of the reason that Shizoku leaned so heavily on her grandmother and the forest spirit for parental guidance was that her father had five wives who also wanted his attention and Shizoku's mother hadn't felt the need to be very responsible when there were other women who were happy to spend time cooing over Shizoku and taking care of her. Kazue was fairly certain that this was also the reason that the young kitsune had a tendency to crush on older men, but hopefully, that was taken care of now.
"So after that, Fuyuko decided she wanted to make her contract with the dungeon official. Mordecai made sure to write everything up with her becoming our ward and after it was done he sent a copy of it to both Riverbridge and Azeria to get her status recorded. And then it was on to training! Gentle training this time. Well, mostly. For Shizoku and Fuyuko it was focused around marksmanship practice, mixed with switching their weapons out on the fly. He doesn't think that Shizoku would need to swap between gun and staff quickly very often, but there was no reason to skip that part of the training. For Fuyuko, he's popping up surprise targets for her and mixing them up with some 'targets' that are actually innocents. He says that it should help her get her battle rage under control. Oh, and the swords that came with her bracers are falcatas. They aren't good for fancy sword work but he figures that sometimes she might just need to hit things hard, so these will be better than her long daggers. I have to say, the only reason those things are 'daggers' is because of how tall she is. They'd probably feel like short swords for me, and almost certainly be swords for you, ankle biter."
Well, Kazue wouldn't mind biting Moriko, but that was a slightly different topic and she had her honor to defend. "Careful what you say, my love. This little ankle biter has very sharp teeth and knows exactly where you sleep every night. And she might just think you are tasty enough to take a big bite out of."
"Eek, I am terrified," Moriko said while laughing, "oh please don't eat me all up scary fox lady, I don't know what I'd do." Ignoring Kazue's threatening glare Moriko continued passing on the dungeon's events. "Anyway, the blades are heavier than Fuyuko is used to and weighted a little strangely, but Mordecai says she's adapting fast. Now, as for Derek, well, Mordecai is pushing him a little bit more. Our husband has sectioned off part of the arena to be an elemental testing and training ground. It generates random sparks and bubbles of different elements which naturally drift toward any living thing in the area and speed up as they get closer. Derek has been sitting in the middle of it and his training is to use only his elemental abilities to push them away. And Mordecai has made sure to lean heavily on fire and lightning as those seem to be Derek's weakest elements right now. Man, the poor kid. But he at least has some moral support, Bellona is right there with him. She's taking more of a beating actually, she doesn't have any influence over wood and only indirect influence on metal. She's not going to be there every day though, and Mordecai plans on this being the majority of their training to finish out the first month of the exchange program."
Given how long it had taken the kids to get through the dungeon, there wasn't a lot more time to finish out a month, so everyone had agreed to just start the program early. After this, Derek and Shizoku would arrange to travel with other groups back to his home and after a few days of rest head back to the dungeon, where Fuyuko would rejoin them and they would all head to the Azeria clan to begin a month of training.
"Everything else has just been going smoothly. With your non-combat path, we've been attracting a lot of people who are willing to spend weeks to get through the dungeon instead of the days it takes the combat teams. Though there aren't a lot of teams clearing the wetlands, most of the ones who finish the river zone don't even try it. The people on your path usually only give up if it's taking too long. Oh, and Mordecai says he'd like you to practice working with enchanting crystal-focused items, especially anything that involves altering the crystal itself. He's hoping that the two of you combined might be able to manually convert other gems and crystals into core matrix, though it will probably take both of you to figure it out."
Well, as much as Kazue admired their husband, she did have to admit to herself that it was kind of nice to see that he wasn't as all-knowing as he sometimes appeared to be. And that wasn't a bad idea, it could make a nice project over the winter, when they weren't occupied by other things. Warm thoughts and feelings flowed with that idea, only to be dashed by a sudden sensation of dread and danger. Kazue spun to put her back to Moriko as she frantically searched for the source of that sensation.
A few moments later she realized that the source was inside her, a tug and pull toward her faraway home. She crushed down the panic that wanted to bubble forth and turned back to Moriko, who had gone still and pale.
Moriko met her worried gaze and confirmed Kazue's fears. "We're under attack."
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Allow me to address an argument you will hear from theists all the time, and as a historian I find it somewhat irritating, as it accidentally or deliberately misrepresents historical consensus. The argument is about the historicity of Jesus.
As a response to various statements, referencing the lack of any contemporary evidence the Jesus existed at all, you will inevitably see some form of this theist argument:
“Pretty much every historian agrees that Jesus existed.”
I hate this statement, because while it is technically true, it is entirely misleading.
Before I go into the points, let me just clarify: I, like most historians, believe a man Yeshua, or an amalgam of men one named Yeshua, upon whom the Jesus tales are based, did likely exist. I am not arguing that he didn't, I'm just clarifying the scholarship on the subject. Nor am I speaking to his miracles and magic powers, nor his divine parentage: only to his existence at all.
Firstly, there is absolutely no contemporary historical evidence that Jesus ever existed. We have not a single testimony in the bible from anyone who ever met him or saw his works. There isn't a single eyewitness who wrote about meeting him or witnessing the events of his life, not one. The first mention of Jesus in the historical record is Josephus and Tacitus, who you all are probably familiar with. Both are almost a century later, and both arguably testify to the existence of Christians more than they do the truth of their belief system. Josphus, for example, also wrote at length about the Roman gods, and no Christian uses Josephus as evidence the Roman gods existed.
So apart from those two, long after, we have no contemporary references in the historical account of Jesus whatsoever.
But despite this, it is true that the overwhelming majority of historians of the period agree that a man Jesus probably existed. Why is that?
Note that there is signifiant historical consensus that Jesus PROBABLY existed, which is a subtle but significant difference from historical consensus that he DID exist. That is because no historian will take an absolute stance considering the aforementioned lack of any contemporary evidence.
So, why do Historians almost uniformly say Jesus probably existed if there is no contemporary evidence?
Please note the response ‘but none of these prove Jesus existed’ shows everyone you have not read a word of what I said above.
So, what are the main arguments?
1: It’s is an unremarkable claim. Essentially the Jesus claim states that there was a wandering Jewish preacher or rabbi walking the area and making speeches. We know from the historical record this was commonplace. If Jesus was a wandering Jewish rebel/preacher, then he was one of Many (Simon of Peraea, Athronges, Simon ben Koseba, Dositheos the Samaritan, among others). We do have references and mentions in the Roman records to other wandering preachers and doomsayers, they were pretty common at the time and place. So claiming there was one with the name Yeshua, a reasonably common name, is hardly unusual or remarkable. So there is no reason to presume it’s not true.
2: There is textual evidence in the Bible that it is based on a real person. Ironically, it is Christopher Hitchens who best made this old argument (Despite being a loud anti-theist, he stated there almost certainly was a man Jesus). The Bible refers to Jesus constantly and consistently as a carpenter from Galilee, in particular in the two books which were written first. Then there is the birth fable, likely inserted into the text afterwards. Why do we say this? Firstly, none of the events in the birth fable are ever referred to or mentioned again in the two gospels in which they are found. Common evidence of post-writing addition. Also, the birth fable contains a great concentration of historical errors: the Quirinius/Herod contradiction, the falsity of the mass census, the falsity of the claim that Roman census required people to return to their homeland, all known to be false. That density of clear historical errors is not found elsewhere in the bible, further evidence it was invented after the fact. it was invented to take a Galilean carpenter and try and shoehorn him retroactively into the Messiah story: making him actually born in Bethlehem.
None of this forgery would have been necessary if the character of Jesus were a complete invention they could have written him to be an easy for with the Messiah prophecies. This awkward addition is evidence that there was an attempt to make a real person with a real story retroactively fit the myth.
3: Historians know that character myths usually begin with a real person. Almost every ancient myth historians have been able to trace to their origins always end up with a real person, about whom fantastic stories were since spun (sometime starting with the person themselves spreading those stories). It is the same reason that Historians assume there really was a famous Greek warrior(s) upon whom Achilles and Ajax were based. Stories and myths almost always form around a core event or person, it is exceedingly rare for them to be entirely made up out of nothing. But we also know those stories take on a life of their own, that it is common for stories about one myth to be (accidentally or deliberately) ascribed to a new and different person, we know stories about multiple people can be combined, details changed and altered for political reasons or just through the vague rise of oral history. We know men who carried these stories and oral history drew their living from entertainment, and so it was in their best interest to embellish, and tell a new, more exciting version if the audience had already heard the old version. Stories were also altered and personalised, and frequently combined so versions could be traced back to certain tellers.
4: We don't know much about the early critics of Christianity because they were mostly deliberately erased. Celsus, for example, we know was an early critic of the faith, but we only know some of his comments through a Christian rebuttal. Clesus is the one who published that Mary was not pregnant of a virgin, but of a Syrian soldier stationed there at the time. This claim was later bolstered by the discovery of the tomb of a soldier of the same name, who WAS stationed in that area. Celsus also claimed that there were only five original disciples, not twelve, and that every single one of them recanted their claims about Jesus under torment and threat of death. However, what we can see is that while early critics attacked many elements of the faith and the associated stories, none seem to have believed Jesus didn't exist. It seems an obvious point of attack if there had been any doubt at the time. Again, not conclusive, but if even the very early critics believed Jesus had been real, then it adds yet more to the credibility of the claim.
So these are the reasons historians almost universally believe there was a Jewish preacher by the name of Yeshua wandering Palestine at the time, despite the absolute lack of any contemporary evidence for his existence.
Lastly, as an aside, there is the 'Socrates problem'. This is frequently badly misstated, but the Socrates problem is a rebuttal to the statement that there is no contemporary evidence Jesus existed at all, and that is that there is also no contemporary evidence Socrates ever existed. That is partially true. We DO have some contemporaries of Socrates writing about him, which is far bnetter evidence than we have for Jesus, but little else, and those contemporaries differ on some details. It is true there is very little contemporary evidence Socrates existed, as his writings are all transcriptions of other authors passing on his works as oral tales, and contain divergences - just as we expect they would.
The POINT of the Socrates problem is that there isnt much contemporary evidence for numerous historical figures, and people still believe they existed.
This argument is frequently badly misstated by thesists who falsely claim: there is more evidence for Jesus than Alexander the Great (extremely false), or there is more evidence for Jesus than Julius Caesar (spectacularly and laughably false).
But though many theists mess up the argument in such ways, the foundational point remains: absence of evidence of an ancient figure is not evidence of absence.
But please, thesis and atheists, be aware of the scholarship when you make your claims about the Historicity of Jesus. Because this board and others are littered with falsehoods on the topic.

Introduction: I am a medical student of 2017 batch... I was selected for PG in NEET 2023 but didn't join, preparing again for NEET 2024. I was humiliated by a surgery resident in my internship, causing me to avoid surgical residency. I would get sudden anxiety whenever I saw him coming in the room. This was totally situational and I knew my neurosis was common as similar stuff started happening to most of my batchmates. Suddenly there was a wave of anxiety issues. I became interested in this particular issue and I realised that it was due to the psychological humiliation in internship that many people wanted to compromise their professional interests... So I wanted to get over this rabid fear neuroses that seniors create when you join a PG course or their department in internship. I researched these resources a tonne and asked with legal experts as well. They all agreed with me on these points as to how to deal with harassment in the workplace...
1) rule 1 - Do not accept harassment..nursing staff, co interns, residents and even professors will try to get you to accept the situation instead of changing it. This is not to be done or else you might develop anxiety and depression. Acceptance of harassment leads to loss of self esteem and it should not be tolerated.
2) rule 2 - Understanding the psychology of abusers and power structures in medical colleges
Most interns are afraid of consequences of disobeying their seniors
Common threats include - 1) holding your attendance 2) failing you on academic evaluations 3) creating uncomfortable work schedule 4) continual over checking of your work 5) making you work longer than usual hours
These threats by your seniors will scare you into compliance.. they will abuse you with these threats.
However, most of these threats are OUTLAWED. Yes you heard it right. You cannot be mentally harassed by anybody on these grounds. It's literally against the law. Yes the professors are psychopathic (lacking empathy) and they will allow it to happen. But guess what it's literally against the LAW. that means all you have to do is catch your seniors saying these things to you on the phone.. or use videography of them saying these things. It's as simple as that. If you gather proofs, you can build an anti ragging case against them.
Modern anti ragging guidelines (2009) include all these kinds of threats as psychological humiliation and make it a COGNIZABLE OFFENSE at par with rape.
Professors will continuously Gaslight you into accepting bullying and humiliation but the law is totally different. Under this regulation, even the principal of the college can easily be booked for allowing ragging.
In the FIR at the police station the Inspector will have to register it (cannot be denied) you can name your abusers at anytime. If you have the proofs with you, your abusers will have to answer their crimes in court. They can't apply for jobs as they'll fail police verification. Since it is congnizable your abusers will literally rot in jail without a warrant. If they're a service candidate, they will literally lose their salaries and increments.. unless the case resolves they can't even get pension. They'll cry everyday.
Another thing is, previous Pg medical education regulation (2000) had no provision of mental health of PG students. Now in 2023 they have added a clause saying everyone in the system will have to give you an appropriate time to rest EVERYDAY. yes, your senior cannot hold you against your will and on contrary to new Regulations. Previously Pg students had no leaves, we were at the mercy of psychopathic professors for leaves. Now we don't have to accept mental harassment for leaves as NMC has clearly defined a minimum of 77 leaves per year. Yes you heard it right 77 leaves per year. They have also removed log book signing.. logbooks will be digitally signed every month.... Also thesis evaluation is to be done by external examiner outside state.. they can't legally do much to hold you against your will, or scare you by saying we won't sign your logbook or thesis. Your PG guide can only guide your thesis someone else will check it.
They will Gaslight you into believing you are learning more or you will face some harsh undedinable consequences But believe me the system has made tonnes of rule for safeguarding human dignity. You can literally write it to the local DM and he will make life extremely difficult for your psychopathic professors and seniors... As per the new rules.
Just to be clear... You only need 80 pc attendance (this is after availing 77 leaves per year) take photos of your attendance register every day you go to college.
The professor cannot make you delay signing logbooks. He has to do it every month. He is powerless here.
They cannot force you to stay over time. They have to give you time to rest every day.
The professor cannot fail you in thesis... Your thesis is going to be examined by someone else.
You only need to present one poster now for final exams. And nothing else. You can even write your own paper and publish as first author without needing your professors help.
You again don't need to ask anyone for permission to start a family... Maternity leave is a right. Please all girls should avail it to the max level. Girls can take one year of leave from PG.
Basic gist is that professors power has been greatly diluted... They cannot make any huge problems for you. They have been rendered powerless as there is no room for ambiguity in guidelines. You don't have to walk on eggshells anymore.. don't fight or say anything just collect evidences and complain directly to the local media, police and district magistrates. There is no ambiguity to shield their psychopathic behaviour anymore. They will have to answer for their crimes.
Code of Professional Ethics 2002 also applies to doctors at any level..
Recently state mental health authorities have been made also.. any non implementation of anti harassment guidelines will land principal into extreme trouble.
Please don't accept ragging and fear and panic in the name of education.. you are not becoming better doctors this way..please change work culture wherever you are. I know to which extent these shameless professors lie....they used to do it because they knew nothing could be done against them... but now time has changed and specifics have been added to the law. Please collect proofs wherever you are..with new guidelines the police will act very quickly...

For those of you who don’t know, there are several wikis for villains.
One of them is called Pure Evil wiki (which, in short, is about villains with no redeeming or sympathetic qualities), the second is called Near Pure Evil wiki (Which, in short, is about villains with almost no redeeming or sympathetic qualities but they still can’t qualify for the Pure Evil wiki for some reason. However, there are other cases where a villain can be Near Pure Evil even if they don't have any redeemable qualities like slightly lacking moral agency or slightly failing the heinous standard of the series because they don't go the extra mile in terms of crimes). There is also a third wiki called the Inconsistently Heinous wiki (which, in short, is about characters who have committed awful crimes, but they still have too many redeeming and sympathetic qualities and excuses for their actions to qualify as Pure Evil or Near Pure Evil). The name “Inconsistently Heinous” means that the characters are too inconsistent in their heinousness to be Near Pure Evil and they need to have many redeeming and sympathetic qualities and/or excuses for their actions. Often times Inconsistently Heinous characters can even be morally ambiguous heroes in the stories they are depicted, but they also do some bad things along the way.
Tyrion and Cersei from ASOIAF are both listed on the Inconsistently Heinous wiki which means they have both done some terrible things, but they can't qualify as Pure Evil or Near Pure Evil because they have excuses for they actions and many redeeming qualities and sympathetic moments.
The characters who listed on the Pure Evil wiki in the books are Joffrey, Ramsay, Gregor, Rorge, Craster, Euron and Maegor Targaryen.
The characters who listed on the Near Pure Evil wiki in the books are Tywin, Littlefinger, Roose Bolton, Walder Frey, Lothar Frey, Kraznys mo Nakloz, Aerys Targaryen, Lo Bu, Janos Slynt, Varamyr Sixskins, Rossart, Joron I Blacktyde, Khal Moro and Wyl of Wyl. There are of course many more characters who could fit on the Near Pure Evil wiki, but so far those are the only ones who have been proposed.
At this point, Tyrion has armed the clans from the mountains and has incited them to attack and pillage the Vale and has expressed a desire to reduce it to ash through said attacks (which gives him a higher body count than Cersei), has given the Antler's men to Joffrey to be brutally tortured and killed, has killed a singer and had his body cooked into stew and fed to poor people, has murdered his former girlfrined Shae and has raped at least one sex slave out of spite, yet many fans think he is a good person or at least a "grey character" who deserves to get a happy ending.
At the same time, Cersei, who has suffered a lot throughout her life and who has lived in fear her whole life that she and her children would get killed which is what fuels most of her actions as she is trying to protect her family and her killing Robert and her actions against Ned are also fueled by trauma from the rapes she has endured and by a desire to save herself and her children from an unjust execution which is enforced by the sexist laws of Westeros who say that a woman who cheats on her husband should be executed while him cheating on her is fine, is somehow "irredeemably evil" and she apparently desrves to be punished and apparently doesn't deserve a chance to change unlike Tyrion even though the two of them have both terrible things.
The way in which Cersei is judged for her actions even though a lot of fans would do them if they were in her place and they think she is "evil" and should be punished, while they give free pass to other characters who do equally horrible things (and sometimes for far less justifiable reason like with Tywin who has suffered FAR LESS than Cersei throughout his life and doesn't even have the excuse that he believes he and his children are going to die if he doesn't do what he does and doesn't have the excuse of being brought by someone like himself) and they don't think the characters they like are "evil" or should be punished for their actions is one of the biggest double standards I have seen.
This is a list of the terrible actions Tyrion has done:

• He crushed the musician Marillion's fingers out of spite.
• He took revenge on Lysa Arryn for imprisoning him by arming the mountain clans with new weapons and armors and then goaded them into attacking the villages of the Vale. While those raids are not shown, from what is described in the books by other people and what is presented about the mountain clans, it is still clear that they were devastating for the people of Vale. Tyrion himself even thought about how the Vale is going to be "reduced to a smoking wasteland" which further shows the destructive nature of his plan.
• While he has a soft spot for underdogs, he has no problem with armies raiding, killing, raping and burning villages down, saying it is just a part of war.
• He seemingly allowed Allar Deem to take the black in and go to the Night's Watch but instead he ordered the captain who was transporting him to throw him off-board on their way to the Wall (granted, Allar Deem had it coming for killing an innocent woman and her baby).
  • He then replaced him with Bronn, someone who is just as amoral. When asked if he would kill a baby without question, Bronn replied he wouldn't kill one without asking how much.
• When Cersei had a prostitute captured, Tyrion threatened that any harm that would come to the prostitute, including rape, he would inflict upon Tommen who is his nephew and a child. When he hears that the prostitute had been whipped bloodily (which was actually done by Tywin, but at the time Tyrion thinks it's Cersei), he thinks with sadness about how he is going to have to do the same to Tommen because otherwise Cersei would win which heavily indicates his threat was actually true.
• When Varys informs him that a large group of men called the Antler Men were planning to sabotage the defenses of the city and let Stannis conquer it, Tyrion has them all arrested and gives them to Joffrey to be brutally tortured and killed. Joffrey nailed antlers to their heads and then shot them with trebuchets against the enemy forces and Tyrion doesn't seem to feel any remorse about it.
• Even though he knew his nephew Joffrey is not the rightful heir to Robert Baratheon and would be a terrible and cruel king, he still supported his claim to the throne and organized the defense of King's Landing against Stannis' forces. His plan to use wildfire to destroy Stannis' fleet which killed many of the sailors, including Davos' four sons, and his management over the defense of the city is what ensured that Joffrey would remain in power.
• He ordered Bron to kill a singer who was trying to extort him. He then ordered him to get rid of the body by giving it to an inn to be cooked into a stew which was then fed to the poor people of King's Landing who didn't even suspect they were eating human flesh.
• When he learned the truth about Tysha, he swore revenge on his entire family, including Jaime, who loved him. He even lied about killing Joffrey and confessed that Cersei is cheating on Jaime, just for the sake of hurting him.
• While he was escaping from execution, he killed his former lover Shae on his way for giving false testimony against him. This act is presented as more heinous than it is in the show because in the books Shae doesn't try to kill him but instead starts apologizing to him and says that she was forced to testify against her will by Tywin and she was too afraid to refuse but Tyrion kills her anyway.
• He shot his father, Tywin Lannister, with a crossbow and killed him (granted, Tywin had it coming for all the abuse he put Tyrion through and for his other actions).
• After his kills his father, he takes a drastic turn for the worst, becoming more cynical and bitter than ever.
• He often fantasizes about hurting his family, often of him raping and strangling Cersei to death. He also fantasizes about Jaime and Cersei's heads on spikes.
• In the fifth book, he goes into a brothel, and even after learning that the girls there are sex slaves who were kidnapped from their homelands and forced to please men against their will, he still forced himself on one of them even after he saw that she is uncomfortable with it.
  • He also threatened to rape another sex slave in Illyrio's mansion as he commented that he is going to claim her after his dinner with Illyrio. He even threatens that if he kills her, her master wouldn't mind because Tyrion is more important to him than some sex slave. The only reason why Tyrion threatens her like that is because he enjoys seeing her afraid of him.
• He manipulated Jon Connington and Young Griff to attack Westeros early, leading to more war and death in Westeros.
• When he became a slave, he took the opportunity when one of the guards gets sick, to feed him poisoned mushrooms, so he can watch him die (though the guard had it coming for his mistreatment of Tyrion and the other slaves).

Tyrion and Cersei have both done terrible things and they both have a lot of excuses for their actions as well as redeeming and sympathetic qualities, but fans only think one of them is "evil" and think that only one of them deserves sympathy and a chance to get better.
This is a list of Cersei's redeeming and sympathetic qualities for reference:

• She loves her family members except for Tyrion (more specifically, her children,her father, Tywin and her mother, Joanna). She is very protective of her children, doesn't want them to die and constantly fears for their safety.

1. When her son Joffrey dies, she breaks down over his corpse and cries and then she stays with his corpse and mourns it for days. At one point, she has a nice dream where Joffrey is still alive and she marries her brother, Jaime.
2. She is angry when Tyrion sends her daughter, Myrcella, to Dorn without her permission and starts threatening him. She breaks down into tears when he mentions that if Myrcella stays, she could be killed in the coming battle. She is also shocked when she learns that Myrcella has lost one of her ears.
3. In the fourth book she gets very protective of her son, Tommen, after the death of Joffrey. When Tommen chokes on his wine, she is afraid that someone had poisoned him, quickly stands up and goes to him to help. When she discovers that no one has poisoned him, she goes away and starts crying. During her imprisonment by the Faith Militant, she constantly thinks about her son and how she wants to go back to him. When she goes back to him, she starts spending a lot more time with him than ever before because she was relieved to see him again after her long imprisonment.
4. At one point, she had a nightmare where Tyrion has tied her up. She begs him to spare her kids, even though in the dream her own life is in danger.
5. She loves her father as she wants his respect, constantly thinks about what he would do and is sad when he dies.
6. She loves her mother. She blames her younger brother, Tyrion, for "killing" her mother because this is what she saw from her father. She also mentions to Sansa that when she was a little girl she prayed to the Gods to give her mother back.

• Another prevention is that Cersei is a bit too tragic and her tragedy holds up. She lost her mother at the age of 7, she was born in a highly sexist society where women are inferior to men and she had to witness every day how she and Jaime would be treated differently (one example is that Jaime was groomed to be Tywin's heir because he was a boy, even though Cersei was older than him) and this treatment made Cersei extremely resentful of her status.

1. At the age of 10, Cersei received a prophecy from Maggy that all of her kids would die, that a younger and more baeutiful queen would take everything she holds dear and then Cersei herself would be killed by her younger brother. Needless to say, this made Cersei very paranoid about her life and the lives of her children and made her even more abusive towards Tyrion because she believes that he is the younger brother from the prophecy. A lot of the crimes that are listed above are an attempt to prevent this prophecy from happening and saving her children and herself.
2. Another aspect that makes her tragic is that her father, Tywin, was neglectful most of the time and he was a brutal ruler who taught his kids that they should be merciless, that they should care about morality only about the end results and so on. There is enough evidence that Cersei was seriously affecte by this upbringing. For example, on one occasion, while she is torturing the Blue Bard, she feels bad for him and wants to stop the torture. But then, she remembers that her father would probably be ashamed of her sign of weakness and he wouldn't do something like that, so she continues with the torture.
3. She was married to Robert Baratheon, who cheated on her and abused her by sometimes even raping her which also has an affect on her because she feels powerless during the rapes and she doesn't want this to happen again.
4. In the world of Westeros if it's discovered that she had cheated on her husband with Jaime, she and all of her kids would be executed. The reason why she kills Robert and Ned is because she wants to protect her life and the life of her kids from execution.
5. In general, she has suffered from systematic sexism for most of her life starting from childhood where she and Jaime were treated differently because of their gender and Jaime was groomed to become the heir to Casterly Rock while she was groomed to be married off despite being older than her brother. When she was married to her husband, she also suffered from the sexism of her society because her husband was allowed to cheat on her while if she was caught cheating, she and her entire family would be executed. She was also raped because there was no definition of marital rape in Westeros.
6. She suffers from a lot of insecurities (about being a woman, winning her father's approval, being fit to rule, etc.). She also has insecurities about not having any friends and she immediately decides to befriend the first woman she meets in the fourth book simply because she doesn't want to feel lonely.

• On one occasion, after Ned gives her a chance to escape with her children from the city before he reports to Robert that she had been cheating on him, Cersei tells him that because of this she would allow him to go back to Winterfell and live out the rest of his life if he kneels to Joffrey and swears fealty to him. Ned doesn't do it and he ends up dead for this reason, but there is no indication Cersei wouldn't have kept her word if he had accepted and she still doesn't agree with Joffrey executing him.
• Even though she is rude to Sansa, she still tries to give her advice about how to rule as a Queen, about the specifics of the female body and that she shouldn't love too many people or else she would get hurt. It's implied that the reason for this is because Cersei sees Sansa as a younger and more inexperienced version of herself. While, Cersei lates desires to execute Sansa because she believes that Sansa was involved in Joffrey's death, it doesn't entirely subvert her prevention because during her Walk of Shame, she still noticebly feels bad about how things turned out and that Cersei could have provided a good marriage for her if Joffrey hadn't beheaded her father. Sansa is also one of the people Cersei hallucinates about which indicates that she feels guilty about how she treated her
• She is capable of feeling remorse on certain occasions. After the torture of the Blue Bard, she feels bad for him and tries to justify herself even if she doesn't take moral responsibility for what she did, and for a moment she even considers stopping his torture.
• She is also played for sympathy a lot as shown by the above examples. Aside from the examples that are already mentioned, during the Walk of Shame when she paraded naked through the streets of the city and the common people throw things at her, the story tries to frame the moment as an "Alas. Poor Villain" by presenting it from Cersei's point of view, presenting it in excrusiating detail, showing how it affects her psyche. The story clearly tries to make the readers feel bad for her during this chapter.

Hey! I’m a 32 year old guy, based in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK. Wondering if Reddit can be the answer in helping me find someone for chats, dates and hopefully a relationship!
About me:

• A big fan of Movies/Series and love going to the cinema. I enjoy all the usual ‘geeky’ stuff (Star Wars, Lord of The Rings, Marvel, Harry Potter etc and the odd bit of anime e.g. Studio Ghibli movies and the occasional shonen series) as well as dumb comedies, romance and more serious sci-fi and drama movies. I haven’t seen all that many horrors, but if you’re a horror fan I’d happily watch them with you!
  
• I own all the consoles (Switch/Xbox/PS5) as well as a PC, but play far less than the cost of them warrants as I seem to default to Movies/Series/Youtube when I’m chilling (see above). Recently I've played a bit of Diablo IV. Co-op sessions with a loved one would be awesome though.
  
• I gym 3 times a week and I like to get outdoors. Walks at lunchtime, cycle rides at the weekend when there is nice weather etc.
  
• Music-wise I listen to pretty much anything from Pop to Dance to Hip Hop to Heavy Metal. In the car, one day you might catch me dancing along to Charli XCX (she is a bit of a guilty pleasure, her tunes always seem to be a bop?) on Radio 1, whilst on another I could be singing every word of System of a Down on a Spotify playlist of music from my teenage angst days.
  
• I enjoy travel - both city breaks as well as typical beach resort holidays. Previous destinations have included Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Egypt (twice). I was also lucky to visit South Africa and China as part of an old job.
  
• I am a parent. I see my son (9 years old) regularly every other weekend, he is awesome! I know this can sometimes put people off but I would say that I still have a lot of free time and a lot of love to give. And be reassured that I do not expect someone to take on mothering responsibilities, just being kind and a friend is enough! I am open to both having more children or not having more children in the future.
  
• I would say I pretty much have my shit together. I have a good career and am a homeowner. I can drive. I have good hygiene, try to dress well and am domesticated (I keep my home clean and tidy on my own no problems). Can cook a little and follow a recipe well enough. Just need someone to share life with now!
  
• Looks wise I’m 5’11”, slim/athletic build, mixed race, dark hair, dark eyes. See me here. And more on my profile here
  

In the future I hope to:

• Go further with my outdoor pursuits. I would love give a try to new activities e.g. hiking, scaling a mountain (nothing big, Snowdon perhaps?), bouldering, stand up paddle, learning to ski
  
• See more of the UK. I recently went to Scotland for the first time in my 32 years! I did some sightseeing around Edinburgh and walked up Arthur’s Seat. But I still have never been to Wales, Cornwall, the Peak District, the Lake District, the Highlands etc!
  
• Tick off a few dream destinations on the bucket list. Some of my top priorities would include Iceland, Walt Disney World/Universal Studios in Florida, Japan and a US Roadtrip.
  
• Find someone!
  

What I’m looking for:

• Someone kind, caring, affectionate. Ideally UK-based.
  
• Looking for a relationship with the potential for long term. Someone up for things like regular date nights, holidays/weekend breaks, cuddles in front of movies or series, cooking together. Celebrating the good times and successes together and supporting each other through the tough moments. And in the longer term living together, making a nice family life (pets, children - if you want that).
  
• Looks wise I’m very open to all races and shapes/sizes, my dating history has been quite a range! If you are quite feminine and like a lot of typically ‘girly’ things (think loving pink/pastel colours, cute animals/characters, baking, hair and beauty) then I do find that quite attractive, but wouldn’t say that is exclusively my ‘type’.
  
• A passion for outdoors/nature would be cool and if you already have an outdoor hobby such as climbing, stand up paddle, skiing etc and would be willing to introduce me to it, even better! Not essential though!
  

If you think we could be a good match then please do send a message. A bit of info about yourself or something we have in common would be a great starting point. Age range approx 25-35 so hopefully we understand the same cultural references and jokes although would open to considering out of this if you like what you read or think we have lots in common!
Hoping to hear from you soon!

Hey! I’m a 32 year old guy, based in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK. Wondering if Reddit can be the answer in helping me find someone for chats, dates and hopefully a relationship!
About me:

• A big fan of Movies/Series and love going to the cinema. I enjoy all the usual ‘geeky’ stuff (Star Wars, Lord of The Rings, Marvel, Harry Potter etc and the odd bit of anime e.g. Studio Ghibli movies and the occasional shonen series) as well as dumb comedies, romance and more serious sci-fi and drama movies. I haven’t seen all that many horrors, but if you’re a horror fan I’d happily watch them with you!
  
• I own all the consoles (Switch/Xbox/PS5) as well as a PC, but play far less than the cost of them warrants as I seem to default to Movies/Series/Youtube when I’m chilling (see above). Recently I've played a bit of Diablo IV. Co-op sessions with a loved one would be awesome though.
  
• I gym 3 times a week and I like to get outdoors. Walks at lunchtime, cycle rides at the weekend when there is nice weather etc.
  
• Music-wise I listen to pretty much anything from Pop to Dance to Hip Hop to Heavy Metal. In the car, one day you might catch me dancing along to Charli XCX (she is a bit of a guilty pleasure, her tunes always seem to be a bop?) on Radio 1, whilst on another I could be singing every word of System of a Down on a Spotify playlist of music from my teenage angst days.
  
• I enjoy travel - both city breaks as well as typical beach resort holidays. Previous destinations have included Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona and Egypt (twice). I was also lucky to visit South Africa and China as part of an old job.
  
• I am a parent. I see my son (9 years old) regularly every other weekend, he is awesome! I know this can sometimes put people off but I would say that I still have a lot of free time and a lot of love to give. And be reassured that I do not expect someone to take on mothering responsibilities, just being kind and a friend is enough! I am open to both having more children or not having more children in the future.
  
• I would say I pretty much have my shit together. I have a good career and am a homeowner. I can drive. I have good hygiene, try to dress well and am domesticated (I keep my home clean and tidy on my own no problems). Can cook a little and follow a recipe well enough. Just need someone to share life with now!
  
• Looks wise I’m 5’11”, slim/athletic build, mixed race, dark hair, dark eyes. See me here. And more on my profile here
  

In the future I hope to:

• Go further with my outdoor pursuits. I would love give a try to new activities e.g. hiking, scaling a mountain (nothing big, Snowdon perhaps?), bouldering, stand up paddle, learning to ski
  
• See more of the UK. I recently went to Scotland for the first time in my 32 years! I did some sightseeing around Edinburgh and walked up Arthur’s Seat. But I still have never been to Wales, Cornwall, the Peak District, the Lake District, the Highlands etc!
  
• Tick off a few dream destinations on the bucket list. Some of my top priorities would include Iceland, Walt Disney World/Universal Studios in Florida, Japan and a US Roadtrip.
  
• Find someone!
  

What I’m looking for:

• Someone kind, caring, affectionate. Ideally UK-based.
  
• Looking for a relationship with the potential for long term. Someone up for things like regular date nights, holidays/weekend breaks, cuddles in front of movies or series, cooking together. Celebrating the good times and successes together and supporting each other through the tough moments. And in the longer term living together, making a nice family life (pets, children - if you want that).
  
• Looks wise I’m very open to all races and shapes/sizes, my dating history has been quite a range! If you are quite feminine and like a lot of typically ‘girly’ things (think loving pink/pastel colours, cute animals/characters, baking, hair and beauty) then I do find that quite attractive, but wouldn’t say that is exclusively my ‘type’.
  
• A passion for outdoors/nature would be cool and if you already have an outdoor hobby such as climbing, stand up paddle, skiing etc and would be willing to introduce me to it, even better! Not essential though!
  

If you think we could be a good match then please do send a message. A bit of info about yourself or something we have in common would be a great starting point. Age range approx 25-35 so hopefully we understand the same cultural references and jokes although would open to considering out of this if you like what you read or think we have lots in common!
Hoping to hear from you soon!

So I have previously posted about my No Paid DLC/No RNG Drops Engage Maddening LTC a few months back, and I’m back with a new spin on this run - an Engage Maddening LTC Ironman. This run operates under all the conditions a regular Ironman playthrough of any Fire Emblem game would whereas the game must be completed without any form of resetting. This means no use of the Draconic Time Crystal, no Retrying maps, and if Alear dies, it’s Game Over. Simultaneously, since this is a Low Turn Count (LTC) run, I will be aiming for the lowest turn count I can under these restrictions. My goal was to complete the game in 70 turns, which saves 3 turns from my previous run. The full ruleset is as follows:

• Ironman (No Draconic Time Crystal/No Retrying Maps/Game Over if Alear dies)
  
• Maddening/Classic/Fixed Growths
  
• No paid DLC; the Fire Emblem Heroes (FEH) Bonuses obtained through a free download from the eShop are allowed (3 Bond Rings and 3 weapons - Folkvangr, Fensalir, and Noatun)
  
• No random drops from the Well; the two guaranteed weapons (Revanche and Represailles) are allowed
  
• No ore from dogs; only the guaranteed ingots from the end of the maps are allowed
  
• No cooking; tonics will be used instead
  
• No Bond Rings except for the FEH ones
  
• All items obtained from Update Bonuses are allowed
  
• Highest available difficulty of Strength Training (specifically Push-ups) will be done every chapter for the guaranteed Bond Fragments and stat boost on Alear
  
• Highest available difficulty of Wyvern Ride will be done every chapter for the guaranteed Bond Fragments, but the RNG reward items (HP tonic, Vulnerary, Antitoxin, Pure Water, and Elixir) from the activity will be discarded
  
• Sommie will be fed and petted every chapter
  
• No Fishing
  
• No Skirmishes
  
• No Spirits of the Fallen (obtained through an active Online Network Connection)
  
• No Emblem Paralogues; the run will be Full Recruitment so Anna and Jean’s Paralogues will be completed
  

The run has finally been completed on its fourth attempt after some additional changes were made to make early game more reliable after failing three times before reaching Chapter 7. I have placed the full run in this playlist for easy viewing. The run was streamed since I think the unedited nature of streams fit Ironmans better, but do note that a substantial amount of time was spent in the Somniel for preparations, including playing the Bond Fragment minigames that have guaranteed rewards. For those who prefer to just see the map clears, I intend to publish individual, commentated videos in a traditional LTC format like my previous run in the future so please look out for those!
But for now, if you're interested in seeing some of the changes, I would like to highlight some of the more notable chapters in this playthrough (either because I implement a new strategy or because of a turn save):

Chapter 4, 5, 6, 7 are chapters I'm grouping together because there's a common thread linking them together. For those who are familiar with my previous run, I had two chapters (Ch. 6 and 7) where I relied on a crit to get the boss kills. In order to have enough reliability to attempt the same turn counts in an Ironman setting, my strategy was to get Louis 2 levels before Teronda attacks him in Ch. 6. The EXP management is very tight and my Ch. 4 and 5 clears were changed a lot in order to accommodate for that. And finally, for Ch. 7, that level 8 Louis is once again helpful in taking down Hortensia.
Jean Paralogue is now completed in 1 turn. Admittedly, this turn save is risky in an Ironman context because Amber and Diamant face a chance of death. Amber really needs to either dodge the Poleaxe (due to its large amount of effective damage) or dodge the first two enemies to survive enemy phase. And Diamant faces a 2% crit chance that surely results in his death. Nonetheless, it's a rout map with some interesting AI behavior and the power of a Mt Augmented Seraphim is put on display here.
Chapter 13 is still a somewhat risky chapter in this Ironman because getting the kills on Tetchie and Totchie is quite demanding in 5 turns. In order to increase reliability, I donated to Elusia level 3 before this chapter (whilst also donating to Solm level 2) to get an early Bolganone without the need to forge because I do not have enough ore for that. After getting the Spirit Dust and class changing to Sage, Pandreo is able to cleanly one-round Totchie with that Bolganone. Despite that, I believe Pandreo could potentially face a chance of death if Amber gets hit by Tetchie as Tetchie seems to attack Pandreo in that situation. And Merrin's crit rate on Tetchie is a bit suspect since I've seen Tetchie attack her if his Cornered Beast skill activates due to being under 50% HP. There's other small parts of this chapter like how Pandreo absolutely cannot crit a 3% on turn 1 that need to go in my favor, but overall, it's not too bad in terms of reliability after the countless changes that were implemented.
Chapter 16 is now completed in 2 turns. In order to get a 2 turn with my restrictions, a lot of staves were used to facilitate movement. Sniper Citrinne shows her power here and despite a lower turn count compared to my previous run, it's much more reliable as it has a 100% chance of success.
Chapter 22 is now completed in 4 turns. In order to get a 4 turn on this map, the heroes on the left side need to have a prompt answer. For other runs, that answer may be deploying a Panette with Wrath/Vantage or Lindon with Elsurge to get one-shot crits. In my case, I used Goldmary as an Axe General to choke the point with a Lyn Engraved Silver Greataxe+2. She just perfectly reaches the two-round benchmark against those heroes and survives three hits against them. And with some Luck and Hit inheritance, she's able to reach 100% hit as well. More optimization went into Kagetsu's combats and everyone's movement so that the map can be completed in one less turn. I do want to make a note of the jumpscare I got due to not inheriting Staff Mastery 2 on Hortensia. Luckily, if I forgot to inherit any skill, it was that one since Kagetsu was awesome and dodged lot in the clear so the extra healing from Staff Mastery 2 wasn't needed, but normally, that Staff Mastery 2 should be on Hortensia in case Kagetsu sustains more damage throughout the map.
Chapter 26 is a bit notable because I had requests to have Jean, Bunet, and Diamant deployed in this chapter. So I showcase how low some of the Dark Emblem benchmarks are for the users of the matching Emblem. A level 2 Jean that reclassed to axe fighter was able to kill Veld, base Bunet was able to kill Loptous, and a Diamant that got 1 level in Griffin Knight would've obliterated Medeus with a Georgios Lodestar Rush if I allowed him. Alas, I did need to make it so that Diamant did not kill Medeus for the rest of the chapter's clear because I was going to use Engage+ this time around.

Thanks for reading!

There is one particular commentary about the conduct of the war in the current Russo-Ukraine war since 2022 that surprised and mystified me for a while and it is how both sides struggle to scale their brigade’s attacks beyond the level of a company or so. This is particularly surprising since in 2014, the 95^th Airmobile Brigade conducted a large, 3-week-long mechanised raid – Zabrodskyi’s Great Raid of 2014, which was described as “the longest armored raid in military history”. A bit of a tangent but Zabrodskyi became a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, in 2019 and on March 2023, “The Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) terminated the powers of the MP from "European Solidarity" Mykhailo Zabrodskyi.”. Apparently, he “is planned to be appointed the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valerii Zaluzhny”. In another tangent, the Marine Corps Gazette article about his raid spelt his name the “Russian” way (Mikhail Zubrowski) while currently, English-language articles that mentioned him used the “Ukrainian” spelling: Mykhailo Zabrodskyi.
Anyway, in the daily thread, I had a comment about an old (2003) US Army Engineering article on conducting Combined Arms Breach (CAB). The article described the common mistakes in CAB made by US Brigades at the National Training Center (NTC). Among it, the first and simplest mistake that most units made were that they failed to mass at the breach point:

Success or failure can often be predicted at the line of departure (LD) based on this fact alone. In fact, most brigade combat team attacks will effectively mass no more than one company team at the point of penetration.

At the time, I thought that this was a common mistake made by “new” brigade commanders and staff (“new” with the assumption of the great churn and turn over of personnel in and out of positions) and the problems of Ukrainian brigades were typical. There is an alternative explanation for the current practice and that is the drones, apparent persistent ISR and increased weapons lethality and proliferation of said weapons led to the fact that only a company at a time can be massed for an attack. Upon reading the piece more carefully and looking for detailed report of Ukrainian brigade-level attacks, I realised that:
1) The nature of the error (not massing more than a company) was different
2) It was not the case (at least in the case examined) that increased ISR and weapons lethality prevented the massing of more than a company.
First, the nature of the error made by American brigades at NTC. Note that this conclusion is my conclusion, based on my understanding of how a brigade would conduct an attack and the article (which is an excellent article and you really should read it for a better understanding of effect CAB). I don’t have access to NTC’s database on past engagements nor experience participating in such event. For the latter, the people who did participated prior to the article publication (2003) must be at least 50 years old. Why and how is mass important, the article stated:

The standard for mass is articulated clearly in FM 3-34.2:
Breaching is conducted by rapidly applying concentrated efforts at a point to reduce the obstacle and penetrate the defense.

• Massed combat power is directed against the enemy’s weakness.
  
• The location selected for breaching depends largely on weakness in the enemy’s defense, where its covering fires are minimized.
  
• If friendly forces cannot find a natural weakness, they create one by fixing the majority of the enemy force and isolating a small portion of it for attack.
  

So, related to error in massing, here are the relevant mistakes:

Wherever we penetrate the enemy, we must ensure that the remainder of the OPFOR remains fixed. We do this with fires, close air support, maneuver, and scatterable mines. We must do this, however, without violating the principle of mass. The OPFOR has great success in the offense, fixing its Blue Force (BLUEFOR) enemy with motorized rifle companies and scatterable mines. The OPFOR does so without significantly reducing its ability to mass at the point of penetration. All too often, BLUEFOR units commit battalion task forces to this task—often one-third to two-thirds of their total BCT combat power.

Note: the OPFOR unit at NTC is the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which roleplay a Soviet Motor Rifle Regiment. Typically, one BCT rotates through the NTC at a time so apparently, “right” means a brigade should not expend more than a couple companies fixing the majority of another brigade outside of the breach. Typical BLUFOR mistake was to use one to two battalions for this task. This error, however, tells us that US brigades did put more than a company to the overall fight; just at the wrong places. So what happened and why? First, how many breach lanes can or should a brigade attempt?
Breaching doctrine basically requires one engineer platoon (with attachments) to execute one lane. There is also a requirement for redundancy— typically 50 percent. In a maneuver task force supported by an engineer company, most of that company is required at the breach. Develop
A brigade typically has 3 or so each of MICLICs, dozers, and rollers. The US Marines’ CAB during Operation Desert Storm experienced 30% failures of the MICLIC to detonate the line charge. Rollers and dozers had to press on clearing mines by themselves and engineers proceeded on foot to attach detonators to the line charges. Some others probed for mines manually, located and removed the mines by hands. With 30% failure and 50% redundancy requirement, a brigade could pretty much only attempt a single breach.
In a stereotypical attack-defend scenario of two brigades, the defending brigade puts the recon/cavalry screen out to screen the front. This screen allows the line and engineer units behind them to put in the defences, obstacles, fighting positions, and mines. Conversely, the attacker put out a recon screen of its own to locate the enemy screen, possibly collapse said screen, then press on to locate the obstacles, whether there are bypasses, and if there is no bypass available, the intel on the obstacles to enable the brigade commands to decide and plan for the breach. I suspect what happened with the American brigades at NTC was that the brigade puts the screen forward, located OPFOR screen, collapse said screen (which should be relatively easy since a US armored cavalry battalion of a heavy brigade are very heavily armed with M1 tanks, M2 and M3 Bradleys, and organic SPGs while a Motor Rifle Regiment recon units are much worse armed: typically BMPs and BRDMs). Then the recon battalion plus the two line battalions behind it makes contact with OPFOR main defensive obstacles. Here are other mistakes noted at NTC:

- Observers fail to provide detailed obstacle intelligence.
- Units fail to interdict enemy engineer defensive preparations.
- Maneuver forces “stumble” into obstacles.

This is what “right” looks like:

TTP: Kill the enemy engineers. Enemy engineers will die. Kill them. Position observers early to detect and disrupt the enemy’s defensive preparations. Target bulldozers, caches of construction material and ammunition, engineer soldiers and equipment, and all obstacle emplacement activity. The enemy’s ability to disrupt our attacking formations and reduce our momentum is directly related to his ability to successfully emplace his obstacles. He knows he cannot defeat the BLUEFOR in a direct-fire battle without his battlefield shapers. Deny him this advantage. Mine emplacement now is a low- risk, high-payoff mission. We must reverse this, making it a high-risk mission for enemy soldiers to employ mines. When an enemy soldier gets the mission to emplace mines, he must tremble with the thought of his impending destruction. TTP: Find the obstacles. This cannot be just an engineer reconnaissance task. This is something on which we must focus combat observation lasing teams (COLTs), Stryker vehicles, brigade and task force scouts, unmanned aerial vehicles, the Joint Surveillance Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), and any other available “lookers.” Find the obstacles to confirm or deny the enemy COA. Confirm the proposed point of breach or penetration. Consider layering reconnaissance assets by sending in initial forces to identify obstacles, with subsequent forces to obtain (before committing breaching forces) precise information such as— - Obstacle location and type. - Gaps and bypasses. - Specific minefield composition, which may dictate what breach assets to use and in what sequence. - Soil conditions, which may indicate suitability for plowing.
We do not have the technology to detect buried mines and many other low-cost, low-technology explosive devices. Therefore we must compensate for this with TTP, task organization, and focused reconnaissance. To be successful, we must focus all available lookers to let us detect mining activity and enemy obstacles before they are emplaced.

My conclusion is that the attacking brigade likely got their recon and first echelon battalions “fixed” on the defenders’ obstacles. Once the location of the breach has been decided, the brigade commander may opt for a hasty or a more deliberate breach. A hasty breach/attack assumes a hasty defence and prioritise speed (who doesn’t want speed in maneuver warfare?). A more deliberate breach that masses more forces will require a lot of redirection of units laterally to reach the Line of Departure (LD). This is quite hard on the battlefield. For the most fundamental reasons: soldiers are twitchy and great efforts are required so that units don’t shoot their colleagues accidentally.

TTP: Plan for traffic control. Get the military police into the fight. Traffic control is a traditional task for military police but one they rarely execute at NTC.

The brigades may have found shifting units too difficult or they were under time pressure to accomplish the breach and decided on a hasty breach with the units already at the chosen point. That translates to one to two companies. Predictably, it failed and the brigade was out of mechanised breaching options.
Another error:

TTP: Avoid the frontal attack. While our doctrine indicates that the frontal attack is the least desirable form of maneuver, it is the one most frequently seen at NTC. Find a flank and mass on it. Exploit a weakness or create one. Isolate the point of penetration. BLUEFOR units rarely if ever surprise the enemy but rather “telegraph” their intentions long before the LD. Find a way to tell a deceptive story without losing the ability to mass effects at the BFT. It’s no easy task but one the OPFOR routinely executes. Use obscuration during preparations and movement to, through, and beyond the LD to make it difficult for the enemy to determine friendly intentions.

The stereotypically Soviet and much derided frontal attacks is also everyone’s default behaviour.
Reading some more of Kofman’s writings and followed the citations on the specific claim that Ukrainian brigades often only send out one company led me to this report by Walting, which I read previously but I skipped over the important part that should have told me precisely the conduct of the Ukrainian brigades. I recently read it again and found the answer between page 7 and 14 on the battles for Novodarivka and Rivnopil.

The series of tactical actions is chosen because it is representative of wider trends, and informative as to how Russian forces manage different tactical challenges, and the various approaches employed by Ukrainian troops. The overview is based on accounts of the operations by participants, captured documents from Russian command posts, open-source material including satellite imagery of the engagements, and a review of non-public videos of the relevant tactical actions.

One should very well read carefully the description of the battle. It’s just 7 pages. The Russian defensive positions consisted of one company each in Novodarivka, Rivnopil and the gap in-between for a total of 3 companies or one battalion. A Territorial Defence Force brigade has been in contact and for the offensive, a mechanised and line brigade were sent in for reinforcement. The breakthrough were to be spearheaded by the mechanised brigade.

After identifying the points for the breach, the offensive started early in the morning of 4 June. Two UR-77 Meteorit charges were fired across the narrowest part of the minefield, blowing two 6-metre-wide channels from the treeline to the north to the edge of Novodarivka. A company column of MRAPs led by a pair of tanks committed to the first breach. “A pair of Russian tanks unmasked and fired on the columns. The Ukrainian tanks fired back at a range of around 800 metres. Nevertheless, the vehicles in the column were knocked out in succession” Basically, this pair of tanks shot up the entire column and was only after being knocked out by SPG-9 recoilless guns.
A second company was then committed to the other breach lane and two more Russian tanks emerged, moved towards the column and firing. “Via UAV feeds, the command post watched the emergence of the enemy, and fires were brought down to try and disrupt the action. Exposed, the breaching company attempted to accelerate through the breach, but deviated from course. All vehicles in the company were then immobilised by mine strike in succession. Russian fires then began to range on the column.”
To the credits of the MRAPs, about many of the dismounts survived and while some retreated, about a platoon’s worth from each company reached the edge of Novodarivka. A third company was committed, with dismounts moving along the breach using the destroyed vehicles for cover or dead grounds to advance. The close combat required to clear Novodarivka took a week. All in all, the brigade attack committed three companies of a battalion and managed to get a company-plus worth of dismounts into close combat in the settlement against a company’s worth of Russian forces
The TDF brigade led the attack on the Russian company in front of Rivnopil. They were reinforced by two tanks and an artillery battery from a neighbouring brigade. The brigade conducted a masterful three-pronged attack by two tanks (a Russian platoon-minus equivalent or half a Western tank platoon) and two infantry platoons.

The tanks, moving in and out of cover, engaged the Russian firing positions to draw the attention of and suppress the defenders. Shortly thereafter, artillery strikes on the fighting positions were combined with the delivery of smoke in front of the tanks. The tanks worked forwards, giving the impression that smoke was being used to cover the advance of infantry.

While the tanks fixed the attention of the defence, a platoon multiple of Ukrainian assault troops moved along the treeline to the east of the Russian fighting positions. From there, it began to lay down suppressing fire and advance in pairs. The action drew the attention of the defence, which now recognised a clear tactical play, with a fixing action to its front, and a major assault about to be launched against its flank. The Russian unit began to reposition to prepare for this attack and attempted to win the firefight to the east. Reinforcing the perception that it was about to be assaulted, the Ukrainian artillery then delivered a heavy salvo against the positions, signposting an imminent assault. The assault when it came did not materialise as the Russian defenders had envisaged. Instead, a platoon of assault troops, having infiltrated forwards along the western flank of the position then advanced rapidly, reaching the defensive positions that had been thinned out in anticipation of the assault to the east. Disorientated and fearing encirclement, the Russian troops began to withdraw towards Rivnopil, abandoning their communications equipment, and leaving five troops behind who were taken prisoner.
This attack was successful but only managed to get a platoon into the close against a company out of nearly a company’s worth of troops. About one-third of each attack managed to get in the close and at Novodarivka the COF was even while at the front edge of Rivnopil, the COF was unfavourable but the shock of being approached from unexpected direction made the Russians retreat. Still, the capture of both settlements took 2 weeks with the rate of advance approximately 700-1200 metres every three days, so you end up with about 400 m/day If you pull out ATP 5-0.2-1, Staff Reference Guide Volume I Unclassified Resources and look at Brigades and below rates of opposed advance ,the rate of advance against prepared defences and intense resistance (1:1 COF), in severely restricted terrains by dismounted troops, is about 0.1 km/hr. It works out to be pretty consistent with the observed rates of advance, assuming 4 hours of fighting/day and indeed about one Ukrainian company versus one Russian company in the close.
Let’s back up and remind ourselves that in this sector, there were three Ukrainian brigades versus 3 Russian companies in the first line. The two reinforcing Ukrainian brigades should be at relatively full strength and those two alone potentially had a 6:1 COF, assuming all can be committed to the fight. Adding the TDF brigade and the overall COF may perhaps be 6-9:1. Leaving 30-50% as reserves as still the overall COF for the first strikes should be at least 3:1 or 4:1, for “heavy” to “medium resistance” with a rate of advance of 0.3 – 0.5 km/h. These two settlements were part of a small salient which there were three parallel axes of advance, with two other ones. Approximately one Russian division was at this salient overall, and in the three brigade's sector there were possibly two more battalions behind Novodarivka and Rivnopil.
The actions at Novodarivka and Rivnopil as described by Walting weakened some of the arguments and reasons given for the Ukrainian Offensive achieving much less than it was hoped:
- “Russian minefields of greater depths, density, and triple stacked mines”. “Ukraine did not have sufficient MICLICs or other engineering vehicles”. The two UR-77 worked perfectly, none was taken out, and they created two lanes. Effectively, one BN had the breaching asset of an entire brigade.
- “Russian persistent ISR, drones, air superiority and helicopters”. "Ukraine cannot suppress Russian drones, helicopters, fighters, and bombers. Breaching is impossible when these Russian air assets are still breathing down the necks of Ukrainians.” During the attack on Novodarivka, one company column was shot up by a pair of tanks. Another column reacted to the appearance of another pair of tanks by speeding up, veering off the cleared lanes and into the minefield. It’s true that Ukraine could not suppress Russian forces, but it was the two tank platoon-minus that blew them up.
- “drones and how dangerous they are”. Note that despite all the talks about how dangerous drones are and how good they are at spotting tanks, four Russian tanks had been able to be effectively hidden and caused havoc among the attackers.
- “Attackers could not mass because of drones and ISR”. Russian fires did rain down on the attackers, but it was along the cleared lanes in the views of ground observers. The argument that drones and ISR are preventing brigades from sending more than a company at a time is somewhat weakened by the fact that the area allowed for the mech brigade to mass three companies, but the TDF brigade only send a company-minus group. The latter used their units well, though.
- “Western tactics doesn’t work”. Well, Ukrainian brigade allegedly trained in the West didn’t make it work. American brigades with officers trained through American system didn’t make it work at NTC. American regiment roleplaying a Russian motor rifle regiment employing Soviet tactics made it work (at NTC). Russian Army not using Soviet-era tactics (they were on the hybrid warfare thing and BTG, etc … back in 2022) couldn’t make it work in 2022. Americans made it work during Operation Desert Storm.
So most of what mystified me about the way Ukrainian brigade employed the forces have been answered. This issue is probably different from the American brigade’s issues of massing more than a company at the breach point. The brigade at Novodarivka was apparently stacking three battalions in a column, and three companies in a battalion in a column and feed one at a time towards a company-sized defence. What remains unclear for me in the first clash at Novodarivka was “who shot the SPG-9 that knocked out the pair of Russian tanks from the flank?”. Apparently, the two leading tanks in the column was ineffective at suppressing the Russian tanks. Were the SPG-9s part of the troops in MRAPs moving along the breach or were they part of an anti-tank unit overwatching the Russian positions from a support position to either side of the lane?
Finally, on the use of obscuration smoke:

Only 3% of Ukrainian artillery-fire missions are smoke missions. As demonstrated during the assault on the company position north of Rivnopil, smoke can be extremely useful in confusing the enemy ground force and obscuring assault actions. But smoke also has the effect of obscuring the view from UAVs which higher Ukrainian echelons and command posts use to coordinate activity and conduct combat management. Commanders persistently prioritise maintaining their own understanding of the battlefield over laying down smoke and concealing their personnel’s movements. Given the criticality of rapid application of artillery to support movement, this prioritisation is understandable, but it also reflects limitations in the ability of the brigade to trust tactical commanders to execute actions when not directed by high headquarters with greater situational awareness.

From the Seven habits:

Of the breach fundamentals—SOSRA—the most challenging may be obscuration. Mechanical smokers (wheeled or tracked smoke generators) rarely create the conditions necessary to allow maneuver formations to get into position to breach. Units rarely identify triggers to transition from artillery-delivered smoke to mechanical smoke and even to hand-emplaced smoke (smoke pots). This is one of the most critical components of the breaching operation that needs synchronization and rehearsal.

TTP: Expend all ammunition. Most units identify appropriate targets and triggers for artillery-delivered smoke. Fewer use mechanical smokers during the approach to the obstacle or at the breach. Very rarely do units employ smoke pots and smoke grenades at the breach—perhaps because it adds to what already is a complicated menu of tasks. Units fail to do so at their own peril. Assume someone is watching and use every available asset to create the necessary conditions for committing soldiers to and through the breach.
Finally, the Engineer article opines that a CAB operation is one that should be planned in details and well-rehearsed prior to execution. CAB is an “Orchestrated Ballet of Farm Implements”

As discussed in the first post, this is my ongoing compilation of the remaining questions Christopher has answered online between August 1st 2023 and April 30th 2024 which I've not already covered in other compilations.
As always, questions are sorted by topic, and each Q&A is annotated with a bracketed source number. Links to every source used and to the other parts of this compilation will be provided in a comment below.
The previous post focused specifically on the writing process. This installment will focus on Inspirations, including Christopher's idea process, specific inspirations used, and some comments about other properties. The next, penultimate post will focus on Worldbuilding and Promotion.

Inspirations

Coming up with ideas

Do you have trouble coming up with new ideas? They don't fall out of trees, but it takes me so long to write a book that I usually come up with at least one or two ideas over the six months to a year that it takes to write, edit and publish, if not longer. So they keep accumulating. One of the reasons that I really like having a world to play in for a long time is that the longer I spend in a setting, the more story ideas suggest themselves because you get to know the characters so much and you get to know the implications of the magic in the world and the culture. [1]
What is your inspiration process like? I read a lot of books, I watch a lot of movies, and I make sure I have time to stare out the window and do nothing but daydream. And all of those things continually give me ideas for stories. [20]
Inspiration can come from anywhere, but good stories and good music will actually give me the proverbial tingle up the spine. And basically nothing else in life does that. So I'm always chasing that high. And that's really the inspiration. And trying to replicate that both for myself and for my readers. [33]
I get my inspiration from the beauty of the world itself, from every book and movie that I watch and read, even the bad ones, sometimes especially the bad ones. I get my inspiration from meeting folks like you who have so much energy and enthusiasm and from thinking and talking and listening to music. Everywhere can be a source of inspiration. [36]
I listen to soundtracks when I write. I can't listen to anything with lyrics because it's too distracting. But my biggest source of inspiration is simply the environment in which I live. The mountains around my house look like the mountains from The Lord of the Rings. If I have no experience with the things I write, the descriptions would probably not be as good. You have to look around for inspiration. Photos, visiting places… that which just comes out of your head ultimately has its limitations. You can do a lot, but it helps creativity if you can base it on your own experiences. [23]
You have an idea, you have a spark of thought. Do you jot it down and leave it? Or do you immediately delve into it? It depends on the idea ultimately and it depends how much of it I have. But I always write something down because I have forgotten story ideas in the past, which sucks. So the instant I have something that I think is interesting, I write it down. I won't write most of these because I don't have the time but I write them all down. I have a file here with 140 pages of story ideas, 19,147 words. I try to write it down. If I have a sense of more of the story than the initial thing, then I'll write that down. Then mostly I just let it sit and I think about it while I'm working on other stories. [28]

Executing ideas

Would you rather lose a mental battle against another author so he could steal your ideas? Or give away your true name to your literary agent so he could control you? Wow. I trust my agent with my life. But I'd go with the first one, lose a mental battle, because honestly, ideas are cheap, execution is what matters. You could take every single idea I would have and give it to Brandon Sanderson, or any other author, and their execution would be totally different than mine, and vice versa. And quite honestly most authors wouldn't want to write the ideas I have, they have their own ideas. So that seems like the least perilous of the two options. [17]
When have the greatest flows of creativity happened for you? Whenever I know what I'm trying to write in terms of the scene, I understand what it's doing for the characters and who the characters are. And it all clicks together. And I don't have to sit there, banging my head against the keyboard trying to figure any of that out and then I could just work on writing it. Are there times where you have to bang your head against the keyboard? Or do you just get up and walk outside and just walk away from it? You need to do some of the head banging on occasion just to get past the tough stuff. But you also have to recognize when you're not making any progress and then it's better to step away, move physically in order to get your brain to move. And learning when to step away is always a challenge and has taken me a long time. [34]
What do you think about the idea that when we're asleep, our minds or souls wander off and act unbeknown to us and perhaps ideas aggregate which may lead to us waking up in the morning with sudden ideas, realizations? I think it's a very common occurrence. The whole point of creativity is that you connect two or more things that are seemingly unconnected. That's what a metaphor is or simile. "Her love was like a red, red rose." It's not literally a rose, but you're connecting two things to make a point. So when you sleep the barriers in your mind sort of descend and it's much easier to connect things. And there does seem to be some indication that if you are trying to solve a certain problem or working on something in the back of your head that your subconscious, whatever the hell the subconscious is, this older more instinctual part of the brain, continues to work on the problem even while you sleep. There have been multiple instances of scientists and inventors, engineers, who have actually thought of the solutions to their problems that they're trying to solve while while dreaming. So it's a known phenomena. And it's something that I do try to take advantage of. Sometimes I will think of things I'm trying to solve right before I go to sleep. The trick is you can't do it in a way that stresses you so that it keeps you up. So don't do this if it's going to keep you up. But it doesn't stress me to think about what I'm trying to figure out with the writing. So I'll think about that as I'm falling asleep and a lot of times I'll have a better idea in the morning or a better sense of what path to pursue and sometimes I'll actually dream of a solution. ... There's also some very solid research that says that if you're trying to learn something, whatever that something is, put in a couple hours of study, practice, whatever it is, and then you need to sleep in order for your brain to consolidate that knowledge. So if you pull an all-nighter studying, you're not going to retain the information very well. But if you were able to sleep even for just three hours, it allows the brain to take that temporary knowledge and encode it in more permanent memory. And that seems to be a very important part of the process. [19]

Fantasy Inspirations

How much has Tolkien influenced your writing, if at all? I wouldn't be here if not for Tolkien. I'll be honest with that. And I think there are a number of other contemporary fantasy authors that were equally as influential on me. But they wouldn't exist without Tolkien either. So Tolkien's the foundation that so much of this genre rests upon. [33]
Which dragon in literature do you find to be the most impactful as an influencer on stories that came after it? Historically, you'd have to put in for St. George and the Dragon, the dragon from Beowulf, Jormungandr, the Midgard Serpent from Norse mythology, Tiamat. Of course, then there's all the Asian dragons as well. And all of those influenced the authors that have influenced us, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula Le Guin, Wizard of Earthsea. Vermithrax Pejorative. [30]
What was the inspiration for how you approached the dragons in your books? For me it was a whole mess of fantasy that I read. Lord of the Rings, of course, with Smaug. The Pit Dragon trilogy by Jane Yolen. Dragon Singer was the first Anne McCaffrey book I read, and that got me into the Dragon Riders of Pern series. I still have a soft spot for Dragon Singer. The Wizard of Earthsea series. Raymond Feist's Magician series. As well as I think the Millennium series by David Eddings. A lot of others. Beowulf, of course. Tad Williams's Memory Sorrow and Thorn, which has some really impressively dangerous dragons in it. [30]
From just the first book and the second I can see how heavily Christopher was 'influenced' by George R R Martin. The part about the swords being imbued with spells to keep them sharp and the dragons growing forever isn't borrowing. It's downright plagiarism. I, uh, have never read GOT. Started the first book in 2011 and bailed when Bran was pushed out the window. However, Tolkien and Dragonriders of Pern were certainly big influences. [R]
Did the way Eragon and Arya ended remind you of the way Will and Lyra ended in His Dark Materials? In love, but unable to be together. Completely unintentional. I didn't read His Dark Materials until I'd already written Eragon (and plotted out the whole series, including the ending). I won't lie though: I love bittersweet endings, and Pullman wrote one of the best ones. [R]

Names

How do you go about naming all the places in Alagaësia? Well, these days I tend to think about where the name is coming from with the internal cultures of the land. So is it an Urgal name? Is it an Elvish name? Is it a Human name? Is it something else? For the human names I'm often drawing from established cultures, Germanic cultures, Scandinavian cultures. But I have a lot of invented and established things within the world itself. So it just sort of depends what I'm writing and how I'm doing it. The nice thing is because I've created various invented languages for the different races, that gives me a good starting place for the feel of some name that I might be creating. [12]
Where do the names in your worlds come from? Some are puns, Eragon is Dragon but with an 'e' instead of a 'd'. It also means an Era Gone By. Saphira is from Sapphire. The names also come from historical names: Germanic, Northern influences or were made up by me based on the rules from my world. For example, Murtagh is Irish. [23]

Name of Names

Does the ancient language have a canon name? I know it's never said in order to keep the mystery feel, but out of curiosity, do YOU know it? Or is it something that does not even truly have a name for you? Yup, I do have a name for it. Not sharing it with anyone, though. :D [R]

World of Eragon

What is the "World of Eragon"? Well it encompasses the entire Inheritance Cycle (Eragon, Eldest, Brisingr, and Inheritance), as well as The Fork the Witch and the Worm, Murtagh, as well as all the other projects that I hope to be doing in this setting, whether books, games, or other things. And the reason we went with "World of Eragon" instead of something like Alagaësia is because Alagaësia is hard to say and hard to spell, and some of the adventures the characters will be going on actually go beyond that land. So World of Eragon it is. Also I'm rather fond of that Brisingr symbol in the "O" there. It felt appropriate for the character, for the world, and like I said, I like it myself. [Y]
What would you say to introduce someone to the World of Eragon? Well, it's the story of a young man who finds a dragon egg. And the dragon and Eragon, they go on a series of adventures and there's duels and dragons and battles and villains and romance and all the good stuff a story needs. I think it's fundamentally a good hearted series. I don't really like to write stuff that's like super super grim. It definitely is a good place to start if you're getting into epic fantasy and you're a slightly younger reader and then as you go along with the books, adult isn't really the word, but they get more elaborate and epic as the series progresses. I was learning as I wrote the series and so I tried to put all of that learning to use with each new book. [12]
What is the difference between the World of Eragon and other fantasy series? The fact that I wrote it and not someone else! There are definitely references to other works, because I love reading about elves, dwarves, magic and dragons and I wanted to write about them. At the same time, there are some unique aspects. I believe that my magic system is unique in the fantasy genre and I have unique races such as the Werecats, Ra'zac and my slightly different take on Dragons. It's a mix of familiar and really new things. [23]

Arya

George [R R Martin] and I invented the name Arya completely independently. We talked about it: he was trying to come up with something fierce and warrior-like … I was thinking of an aria in an opera. [R]

Eldest

I was today years old when I realized "Eldest" refers to Murtagh. And Roran. [T]

Shruikan

Me, a weeb, reading Shruikan as "shuriken" Where do you think I got the name from? Shruikan is just 'shuriken' rearranged a bit (and with the 'e' changed to an 'a'). [T]

Do Well Then

Am I the only one who ever realized that Du Weldenvarden sounds like Do Well Then, Varden? You are not. [T]

People, Places, Things, and Scenes

Eragon

Does the character Eragon resemble you? Initially, yes, a lot! But the more the story progressed, the more my hero experienced his own adventures. The common point that remains between him and me is that we both like to ask each other questions. [4]
What are the commonalities that you now still have with Eragon to this day? Curiosity. Eragon is very curious about the world and wants to understand it and learn, and that's definitely something I still have and still pursue. Probably a willingness to tackle big adventures and projects, even knowing it's going to be a huge thing. And then maybe a basic sense of optimism, all things considered. [19]
Eragon's journey appears to me from the beginning to the end a quest of research of identity, of self-discovery, the "Who am I?" question. Did you put yourself through the same examination Eragon and Saphira did on Vroengard while searching for their true names? And do you have an idea of what your true name will be? I think that identity and character and figuring out who you are is one of the central things of adolescence. Because you transition from a child to an adult and figuring out what sort of an adult you're going to be, and how you fit into society and how you're going to function as an adult once you have agency and power versus a child who usually doesn't have a whole lot of agency and power. And so that's why writing about adolescence to me very naturally becomes writing about identity and who you are. And yes, it's something I have spent a large portion of my life thinking about and figuring myself out. I think I have a pretty good idea of who I am and have had a pretty good idea for a long time. If you asked me to guess at my true name, I think I could come pretty close. [19]
Do you think emulating your characters’ actions is a necessary part of the writing process? It’s definitely not necessary, but it can be helpful. Having personal experience with a particular activity is always a plus. Failing that, books, articles, and YouTube can be a decent substitute. Given that I write about spaceships and dragons, there are somethings that I’ll never be able to encounter in real life . . . but, hey, that’s what our imaginations are for! [10]

Beor Mountains

I drew a map and it was like the western half of the current map. And I thought, well, this gives me everything I need. But then I was like, "oh, I want to visit this location. I want to visit that location." And pretty soon I realized I was out of space. So I didn't want to spend like days and days drawing another map because I wanted to keep writing. So I took another sheet of printer paper and put it next to the first one, and I quickly scribbled in some mountains in a giant forest. And I was really lazy. I did this in like 15 seconds, 30 seconds tops. And I was moving so fast that I made the mountains huge. And I looked at that and I was like, well, wait a minute, what if they actually were 10 times bigger than the normal mountains? And that's how I got my Beor mountains. Also, I'd read an article about the mountains in New Zealand being 10 miles high if it weren't for erosion, given their rate of upheaval. That also contributed. [34]
You grew up in Montana, is it true that the valley where Eragon comes from is based on that? Yes. There is even a mountain in the valley that is as high and the same shape as Tronjheim, the mountain where the dwarves live. And I looked at that and thought: hm, what if that was a city? You can take things from everyday life and recreate them in something. [23]

Roran

Roran and his chapters have a good bit of biblical allegory. It wasn't intentional, but I read a LOT of Biblical stuff growing up. Make of that what you will. [R]

Forging of Brisingr

One of my favorite parts of the Inheritance Cycle was the forging of Brisingr. Tell us about the research process you used in order to construct such an intricate and detailed scene. I've done a fair bit of metalworking myself. I built two forges as a kid. I credited in the back of Brisingr two different books I have on Japanese sword making, both of which I referenced pretty heavily because they were relevant, since Brisingr is made for meteorite steel and there's various reasons for using the Japanese method on a western-style sword in that book. So I did some research but I also had a fair bit of practical knowledge and that was helpful. That scene actually was even longer because if you know your metalworking you'll know there's definitely some things I skimmed over or condensed and it was just because the scene was too long and my editor said, "look, Christopher, just summarize or say it was magic. You've got a magic elven smith, let her use some magic, move it along a little faster. So I was aware of the things that I had to skimp over a little bit, but no, that was one of my favorite scenes to write and I think that came through since so many people enjoyed it. [34]

Erôthknurl

Is this [Japanese dorodango] what Orik's earth rock was based off of? Of course. [T]

Burrow Grubs

Trauma is an element that's always been a part of these books, but it's been talked around and mentioned, up until I think the burrow grubs in Inheritance. That one is rude. They're bad. I won't lie. They came from a nightmare. That literally came from a nightmare. I shared it with the world so that it's out of my head and into yours. But when I write about something, I stop thinking about it. After it's done, it purges it from my brain. [11]
I need to know how you came up with the burrow grubs because they've always freaked me out. Bad nightmare. [T]

Inheritance Climax

Was there a particular experience in your life that suggested to you that it was ultimately through compassion and empathy that Eragon will vanquish Galbatorix? No. It was the result of sort of a long chain of logic while writing the books, and a lot of thinking I've been doing about violence and responses to violence and when it's appropriate to use violence. Part of the chain of logic was the fact that I just got sick of writing sword fights. I wrote a lot of sword fights between Eragon and Arya, Eragon and Murtagh, and of course, Roran's hammer fights. So resolving the entire series's conflict just through a physical confrontation felt inadequate. There needed to be a moral component to it. One of my own criticisms for myself here is that I feel like I failed to do that with Roran in Inheritance. There really should have been a little bit slightly deeper resolution to his storyline and his confrontation with Barst that taught us something new or resulted in a change in his character. Roran's character is a little different than Eragon's because he's already grown up in a lot of ways and thus is not resolving the same issues, but a good arc, a good journey, would have reflected on what was happening with Eragon and Galbatorix. So how Roran defeats Barst in some ways should stand in contrast to how Eragon defeats Galbatorix. Maybe it does, but that's something I would have spent more time taking another look at were I to do that now. But again with Eragon and Galbatorix, just one more sword fight was inadequate. So much of the story with Eragon involved him paying attention to the lives of the ants and learning about the different groups in Alagaësia, the Urgals, the dwarves, this and that. So all of that played into this decision to have him defeat Galbatorix in that matter. And with all of that, the fact that I really didn't want there to be some obvious way of defeating Galbatorix. Galbatorix isn't stupid. He protected himself in all of the ways that one might think of protecting himself, and he's had a long time to think about that. So it needed to be something that was non-obvious. Non-obvious and yet inevitable. [19]

Favorites

Which of the fantasy creatures/races did you most enjoy writing about? I obviously love dragons. Before Murtagh I would have said the dwarves because I think they are funnier than the elves, although I enjoy writing about the elves too. But the dwarves are more earthly and interesting and human in their own way. [21]
Who is your own favorite character anyway? Saphira. I used to say Eragon right after that, but nowadays Murtagh is number two. That said, I feel most connected to Brom. Because I'm also getting old and starting to get some white spots in my beard. [21]
Which of your characters would you bring along with you to a deserted island? Saphira, because she could fly me off the deserted island. [34]
Which place in your Eragon universe would you like to live in the most? Probably with my dwarves, because they live in these 10-mile high mountains. And I love mountains and I have a beard like a dwarf these days. And I think the dwarves have more fun than the elves. [2]
Which fantasy world would you like to live in? Middle-Earth can be a nice place to live in some places, especially Hobbiton. I wouldn't mind living in a Hobbit hole and writing my books there. [23]

Interactions with other media properties

Getting into Fantasy

I got into sci-fi and fantasy because of a magical creature. My parents had a lot of sci-fi fantasy in the house, and I wasn't particularly interested in it at the time. But when I was around eight, my grandfather was taking me through a bookstore. I saw a book that had a knight in full armor without his helmet, holding a spear, facing off with a giant scaly humanoid, dragon-like monster. And at eight years old, all I knew was that this was the coolest book cover I had ever seen in my life and that this therefore must be the best book in the world. And so I begged my grandfather to please, please, please, buy me this book. He wasn't entirely sure about it, but he bought it for me anyway. That ended up being The Ruby Knight by David Eddings, which I took home and I read as fast as I could. I got a little concerned as I got near the back of the book because I was getting through the pages and then there's only this many pages left. I started to get this weird feeling that somehow the author couldn't end the whole story in the number of pages that were left. And sure enough, when I got to the end, I discovered that this was the middle book of a trilogy. Yeah, I wasn't always the brightest kid. So I finished that and immediately said, "well, I need to know what happens". So I went to our library and I read all the David Eddings books they had. There really was no internet back then, so I didn't know what to read next. So I'm standing in the library staring at Eddings, "E". What do I read next? Well, two shelves down from "E" was "F" and there was a giant book called Magician by Raymond Feist, which had a dragon on the cover. And I thought, okay, well maybe that's good. It's got a dragon, the same magical creature. So I checked out that book and I read it and it was pretty awesome. So I read everything by Raymond Feist. And then I go, "well, what do I read now?" And well, a couple of shelves down, there was a book called Mossflower by Brian Jacques which was the prequel to Redwall, so I read the entire Redwall series. And wasn't too far from Brian Jacques to Anne McCaffrey, and there was the Dragon Riders of Pern series. So I basically worked my way through the library, just chasing the covers with dragons and talking animals, which is not the worst way to set up a reading program when you're ten. And that really transformed my life. And I just absolutely fell in love with reading in a way that I never really had before. [35]

Anne McCaffrey

Is it awkward though, sitting here between Dragonriders of Pern, the original series about Dragonriders, from a beloved author who was nice enough to give you a blurb for your first novel, knowing that you sort of borrowed the whole Dragonriders thing? Oh, not at all. Absolutely shameless about it. And McCaffrey was kind enough to give me not just a blurb, my first blurb. So funny thing is I did kind of repay her in the most roundabout way. I was touring in Spain and found out that her books were out of print there. And I talked them up so much that they ended up reprinting the entire series in Spain and I blurbed her books in Spain. But you know, it's a small market so it probably doesn't count. Right. No, I would say not. [31]

Star Wars

I was homeschooled and raised in a very rural environment in Montana. I had no access to the internet and stuff. I literally had not heard about Star Wars all the way up until I was 14. And it was referenced in the movie Space Camp. And I said, "Why are they saying 'Luke use the force'? What does that mean?" And my dad got this horrified expression on his face. Like he had failed as a parent, and so we watched Star Wars the next day. [5]

Star Trek

The problem with Lost is those seasons are full length seasons. I mean it's like 23, 26 episodes. It's a huge commitment. My wife watched Next Generation for the first time a couple years ago, and each season is like 24 or 26 episodes, and it's a big commitment of time. And that's part of the problem getting into something like Battlestar Galactica or something else. [21]
Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek, because they actually managed to take the Ferengi and turn them into interesting, well-rounded, deep characters, which you wouldn't think, and not just the Ferengi, but other aliens, which the other Star Treks didn't manage to do anything like that, I think. [29]

The Prisoner

The original Prisoner television show is the most prophetic piece of science fiction in a lot of ways because it deals with loss of privacy and individuality, the strength of the individual against the system of government. And the cool thing too is that I think The Prisoner is definitely an auteur piece. It was written by Patrick McGuinn who also stars in it and he also directed the majority of episodes. And it directly follows from his earlier series Secret Agent Man. When that show ended he was at a party and there were some governmental officials and someone asked him, so what does a secret agent do when he retires? And he said, I don't know, you tell me what does a secret agent do when he retires? And the bureaucrat just kind of goes, well we take care of them. And that was kind of the beginning of the concept for the show. A lot of people hate the ending. I actually quite like the ending but there's a sense of absurdity to the show as well that I think is very well suited for the nature of modern life given that although we live in a Heinlein future in the sense we have rockets taking off and landing vertically as God and Heinlein intended, at the same time, we live in a very strange modern life and Philip K. Dick captured that, but I also think the prisoner absolutely did. So if you haven't seen The Prisoner, I can't recommend it enough personally. McGuinn had some really strong philosophy driving it underneath. He was a very religious man, actually very similar to Gene Wolfe, both Catholic. And that drove a lot of his beliefs and approach to the material. [21]

House of the Dragon

I'm not necessarily a fan of the way George R R Martin writes. House of the Dragon pretty much started with a bloody scene about a young mother who had to pay for the birth of her child with death. My wife was just heavily pregnant, I turned off the TV and didn't look back. But there is no arguing about the quality of Game of Thrones and the enormous cultural impact of the series. All respect. [18]

Dragons Love Tacos

I've had to read Dragons Love Tacos to my son more times than I care to remember. Look, dragons do not love tacos. Dragons love some of the things that go into tacos, like cows or maybe sheep or goats. But dragons do not love tacos. And this is sheer slander upon the whole race of dragons. [14]
They'll probably like the ground meat that sometimes goes into tacos, but no, dragons don't eat tacos. Come on. [34]

Video Games

What was the first game that you played where you thought, I really love games? Crystal Quest. If anyone remembers that. Old game that was on the Mac Classic. I got up to level 99 on that or something. It was insane. But, yeah, Myst, Riven especially, the Marathon series, Mass Effect trilogy. Loved Control recently. I've spent way too many hours playing Far Cry 5 because it's set in Montana and looks exactly like Montana. And there are some similarities to things in that game, to actual real world stuff, which is kind of weird, but it's cool. I don't know. Too many games to list and they're all awesome. [26]
I played a lot of classic Mac games, we're talking about like on the old Mac Classic, so things like Crystal Quest and Starship Mono and things like that. And then later on, when the computers upgraded, I loved the Myst series, so Myst and Riven. My friend had a PC, so I got to play the original Doom and Wolfenstein 3D and all of that. On the Mac, I loved the Marathon series. That was a huge influence on me with storytelling. I'm really excited that they're rebooting it or doing a sequel to the Marathon game finally over at Bungie. So the Marathon trilogy. Unreal Tournament 1999 is still the best shooting game I've ever played in a lot of ways, a tournament game. So yeah, all that stuff definitely had an influence on me. [12]
All of my gaming experience was computer games, video games. One that had a huge influence on me was the old Myst series. Personally I love solving puzzles, so that's the first thing. And also the concept of the series, especially with the second game, Riven, it's all based around people writing books that create new worlds. And you get to go in them and solve puzzles and understand how that world works. And that just tickled every single part of my brain back in the day. [26]
Now, funny thing with Spyro is that the company that made the Spyro games actually worked on the Eragon video game back in the day. Now, I've never played the Spyro games, but my wife is a huge fan of them, and I like Spyro. Proper number of legs. The wings are a little small, though. But sheer force of personality, and at least Spyro's not a dog dragon. [13]
What do you love about Mass Effect? I like the RPG elements, but I like the universe. I like the setting. I like the fact that really their big jump is they assume the existence of this element zero that if I'm remembering it correctly, allows for all of the technology. And then they don't break the laws of physics past that. They assume there's one break from what we know and then explore that. But I love the setting. I like how much blue they use. No, seriously. And if I'm remembering correctly, one of the planets in Mass Effect actually is the planet from Dragon Age. So they've tied in their two different franchises, which is cool. I have so many wonderful memories with the characters and in the world of Mass Effect that in some ways it was almost like a Star Wars experience for video games. [21]
There's great aliens in Mass Effect. I seem to recall Wayne Barlow, an artist, creating a cool book with some aliens in it. [29]

Minecraft

My favorite game these days is Minecraft. If you put a gun to my head and told me I can only have one game for the rest of my life, I'd pick Minecraft right now. If you go to my YouTube channel, you can see my storage system, which is mechanized and can store every single item in the game, either in shulker boxes or bulk storage or chests. It's mechanized. If you're familiar with the Hermitcraft series, they actually invited me on the server as a guest at one point. Scicraft, I got to tour with them. I built a machine to kill the Ender Dragon with one arrow. I love Minecraft. The problem is I could spend so long playing Minecraft, I will never write another book in my life. So I haven't played it in six months. But I really want to update my storage system. So we'll see. [26]
You went almost a decade from the time that you published Inheritance to the time that you published another book that people cared about, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. What were you doing during this time besides Minecraft? Have you seen my storage system in Minecraft? I have, it's pretty solid. It's not just solid, it's like I built a computer in Minecraft. Honestly, I could have written another book. I was going to say, imagine if you had written a book instead. What was I doing in those ten years? Well, I suppose I was just relaxing on my giant pile of money. Plagiarism pays, nepotism pays, I was just relaxing, enjoying life. And then I decided that I should probably, pay tribute to a lot of the sci-fi games and movies that I enjoyed and pluck up a bunch of pieces from them and paste them all together and put out a new book. And that was To Sleep in a Sea of Stars. That's fantastic. Absolutely. And you know what's even better? It won Best Sci-Fi of the Year over at Goodreads. I'm starting to wonder if you might be a pretty smart guy. People have said that on occasion, but I don't really believe it. Yeah, I wouldn't either. No, I wouldn't. I wouldn't. [31]

Crossovers

Who wins in a fight, Kratos or Eragon? I'm enormously fond of Eragon and he does have magic at his disposal, but we are talking about a man who literally killed the Greek pantheon and then the Nordic pantheon. So I hate to say it, but I think Kratos has it here. Not to mention that technically his son becomes the Midgard Serpent. [30]
Who would win in the fight? Eragon or Anne McCaffrey? Not the dragons, the author? Well, look, Anne McCaffrey gave me my first blurb. I kind of have to go with Anne McCaffrey there. [30]
[Rebecca Yarros:] How would our dragons interact with each other? I think your dragons would consider Saphira a bit soft. But I think Saphira would rise to the occasion. She's more humane. Like she's more human. She has more like a softness to her, as where mine are superior jerks. Well, I think also she's trying to be nice for the nice little squishy humans around her. And if she were stuck with a bunch of dragons who weren't quite so nice, she'd probably go a bit more feral. [33]
What would Eragon's signet be if he was in the Fourth Wing world instead? Probably something with fire, firebending essentially. The first spell he ever used was Brisingr, which was fire. So probably something with fire. I think that that seems appropriate. I could come up with something more exotic, but let's face it, Eragon's kind of basic. So it's going to be fire. [33]
I assume Roran would have carried a 45-70 govt in a different timeline. He absolutely would, if not a 45-90 or even a 50-110. [R]
What Taylor Swift song do you feel most represents each character? I’ve never listened to a Taylor Swift song, so … How is that even possible?? You must not have listened to a radio in the last decade. You would be correct. That is actually insane. What kind of music do you listen to? I love classical. However, mostly I listen to movie & game soundtracks while writing. And when not writing, I've had enough music, so don't listen to stuff. I can't listen to anything with English lyrics while writing. Messes with the words in my head. Nothing while lifting? Heh. Heavy Metal. Amon Amarth. That sort of thing. [T]

Carl von Clausewitz

01 June 1780 to 16 November 1831
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Carl von Clausewitz’s Moral Science of Warfare
Saturday 01 June 2024 is the 244th anniversary of the birth of Carl von Clausewitz (01 June 1780 to 16 November 1831), who was born on this date in Burg bei Magdeburg in 1780. (Wikipedia says that Clausewitz was born on the first of July, rather than June, but it’s possible to find pictures of Clausewitz’s grave marker, which gives his birth date as the first of June, so I will take this date as definitive.)
Clausewitz is remembered as the philosopher of war, and I have many times said that the philosophy of war and the philosophy of history are close cousins. If we hold that war is the motor that drives history forward, which many philosophers have argued, then was is the causal mechanism by which history is realized. Hegel and Marx in particular are associated with this view. We could even say that war is the reality of which history is the appearance.
And Clausewitz knew war. It was during the Napoleonic Wars that Clausewitz experienced his baptism by fire, so that his book On War is an account of war during the Napoleonic wars, and it is from On War that a mature conception of war has evolved and continues to evolve. By a “mature conception” I mean a theoretically mature conception of war. Since war inflames passions and feeds off irrationality, it can be difficult to engage with the topic of war with the requisite scientific disinterestedness. Clausewitz was the first to bring the attitude to the Enlightenment to war, and to seek to understand war as a rational process. One could argue that Hegel was doing something like this from a philosophical perspective at about the same time, but Clausewitz was a soldier with intellectual interests, while Hegel was a philosopher with an interest in history. The results were bound to be very different, and they were.
Also, Clausewitz’s understanding of Enlightenment rationalism took place when the romantic reaction against Enlightenment rationalism was already well underway, so, again Clausewitzs rationalism was bound to differ from the high Enlightenment representatives like Gibbon, Hume, and Condorcet. It might even be argued that the changes to Enlightenment rationalism that followed from the romantic reaction facilitated the very possibility of applying scientific reason to an object of knowledge as apparently irrational as war. There is an excellent book about post-Enlightenment science, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, that tells the story of the development of science during the romantic era. Holmes doesn’t discuss Clausewitz, but it would have fit nicely into the narrative.
As the scientific revolution continued to unfold, new influences came to bear upon the development of science, and this in turn opened up scientific knowledge to further frontiers. Clausewitz reflects both Enlightenment and romantic epistemic imperatives. We can find in Clausewitz an intimation of the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic science:

“One may laugh at these reflections and consider them utopian dreams, but one would do so at the expense of philosophic truth. Philosophy teaches us to recognize the relations that essential elements bear to one another, and it would indeed be rash from this to deduce universal laws governing every single case, regardless of all haphazard influences. Those people, however, who ‘never rise above anecdote’ as a great writer said, and who would construct all history of individual cases-starting always with the most striking feature, the high point of the event, and digging only as deep as suits them, never get down to the general factors that govern the matter. Consequently their findings will never be valid for more than a single case; indeed they will consider a philosophy that encompasses the general run of cases as a mere dream.” (On War, Book Six, p. 374)

This is still true today for those who insist that history is exclusively idiographic. In another work, The Campaign of 1812 in Russia (1823 - 1825), Clausewitz gave an account of history that seems highly idiographic, but which does not necessarily exclude the possibility of assimilating events to a nomothetic explanation:

“Although we are not inclined to see the events of this world as resulting from individual causes but always take them as the complex product of many forces, so that the loss of a single component can never produce a complete reversal {but only a partial transformation relative to the significance of the component}, we must nevertheless recognize that great results have often arisen from seemingly small events, and that an isolated cause, strongly exposed to the workings of chance, often brings forth universal effects.” (Chapter V, From The Campaign of 1812 in Russia (1823 - 1825))

Clausewitz had enough of the Enlightenment in him that he looked for the relations that essential elements bear to one another in war, and he was enough of a romantic that he recognized that it would be rash to deduce universal laws governing every single case. So should the study of war be idiographic or nomothetic? As I read Clausewitz, it’s a little of both, and it needs to be a little of both. As our theoretical framework for understanding war increases in sophistication and detail, we might be able to assimilate more individual cases to universal laws, but we won’t exhaust individual cases any time soon.
In an introductory essay to the English translation of On War by Peter Paret we find this description of Clausewitz’s intellectual independence, which was probably a necessary condition for this project:

“…important for our purpose is the intellectual independence with which he approached the fundamental military issues of the age, as well as his sympathy with the aims of humanistic education, and his conviction that the study of history must be at the center of any advanced study of war.” (p. 8)

Clausewitz himself makes the importance of history explicit:

“While there may be no system, and no mechanical way of recognizing the truth, truth does exist. To recognize it one generally needs seasoned judgment and an instinct born of long experience. While history may yield no formula, it does provide an exercise for judgment here as everywhere else.”

Clausewitz is here making a logical point that would later, in the twentieth century, be recognized as the decision problem. A whole series of metalogical theorems on decidability have been proved for various calculi. The problem is to determine a yes or no answer to a question about a theorem, for example, whether or not a given proposition is a theorem of a given system. History is of course much too complex to be reduced to any calculus, so no currently conceivable decision procedure is out of reach for history.
Even if history provides us with no formulae, it still can be a source of insight and judgment. Clausewitz elsewhere in On War goes even further and seems to deny that systemic study could be effective:

“History provides the strongest proof of the importance of moral factors and their often incredible effect: this is the noblest and most solid nourishment that the mind of a general may draw from a study of the past. Parenthetically, it should be noted that the seeds of wisdom that are to bear fruit in the intellect are sown less by critical studies and learned monographs than by insights, broad impressions, and flashes of intuition.” (On War)

Given the state of our knowledge of history, Clausewitz is probably right about this, and we have to mostly depend on insight, impressions, and intuition. However, I would argue that Clausewitz leaves this problem open-ended, especially in light of the earlier quote in which he mentions rising above anecdotes, as insights, impressions, and intuitions without even the possibility of assimilating these to general laws would amount to little more than anecdote, which Clausewitz explicitly says we must rise above.
There is another sense in which we can say that history informs our theoretical conceptions. Raymond Aron wrote a study of Clausewitz, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, in which he makes an interesting observation:

“In his youth, he introduced moral forces into his theory; in his maturity, he introduced the conceptual distinction needed to reconcile the transhistoric theory with history, in other words the two extreme forms of war, each one conditioned or determined by circumstances or political intentions. In order to establish the equality of status in the two types of war, he had to recognize the unreality of absolute war which in many texts he represented as the only one consistent with the concept.”

Aron is suggesting that Clausewitz’s chief theoretical conception, absolute war, was unreal, but that it is conditioned and determined by historical circumstances. For Aron, history was the force that made theory responsive to practice. This is not all that different from the saying attributed to Thucydides, viz. that history is philosophy teaching by example. Thucydides also said that war is a stern master, and it brings men down to the level of their circumstances. Clausewitz knew this first hand, and when the lessons that philosophy teaches are the lessons of men being humbled despite the pretences to some higher position in the world, then we have been well and truly humbled.
We could call Thucydides’ observation about war being a stern master the Copernican principle of war, because it forces all participants into a recognition of their smallness within and peripherality to the bigger picture. Clausewitz himself had his share of Thucydides’ Copernican principle of war. He was in the thick of things during the Napoleonic wars, serving as aide-de-camp to Prince Augustus Ferdinand of Prussia at the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt on 14 October 1806, where Hegel had glimpsed Napoleon and called him the world-spirit on horseback. Hegel fled Jena carrying the manuscript of his Phenomenology of Mind. Clausewitz was taken prisoner of war along with 25,000 others and spent two years as a prisoner of war in France after the catastrophic defeat of the Prussians at Jena. So Clausewitz experienced war as a stern master and he knew the bitterness of total defeat.
Fichte had also felt the weight of the German defeat by the French. In my episode on Fichte I talked about how he had given a series of public lectures subsequently published as Addresses to a German Nation. When Fichte was delivering this talk he is quoted as having said:

“I know very well what I risk; I know that a bullet may kill me, like Palm; but it is not this that I fear, and for my cause I would gladly die.”

War was also a stern master to Fichte; even those who were not soldiers like Clausewitz risked all. Like Fichte, Clausewitz believed that his people could rally, overcome defeat, and eventually regain their political autonomy. Machiavelli, too, had known defeat and had seen his people humiliated by an occupying force, which was also the French, but several hundred years earlier. Fichte wrote an essay about Machiavelli, which, after Clausewitz read it, he sent a letter to Fichte about his Machiavelli essay. In Clausewitz’s letter to Fichte he wrote this:

“This true spirit of war seems to me to consist in mobilizing the energies of every soldier to the greatest possible extent and in infusing him with warlike feelings, so that the fire of war spreads to every component of the army instead of leaving numerous dead coals in the mass. To the extent that this depends on the art of war, it is achieved by the manner in which the individual is treated, but even more by the manner in which he is employed. The modern art of war, far from using men like simple machines, should vitalize individual energies as far as the nature of its weapons permits—which, to be sure, establishes a limit, for an essential condition of large forces is to have the kind of organization that permits them to be led by a rational will without excessive friction.” (Letter to Fichte)

For Clausewitz, friction was a technical term. He wrote an entire chapter on friction in On War, saying, among much else:

“Friction is the only concept that more or less corresponds to the factors that distinguish real war from war on paper. The military machine—the army and everything related to it—is basically very simple and therefore seems easy to manage. But we should bear in mind that none of its components is of one piece: each part is composed of individuals, every one of whom retains his potential of friction.” (On War)

Returning to the previous quote, Clausewitz names three conditions of modern war as: 1) mobilizing the energies of individual soldiers, 2) leading them with a rational will, and 3) doing so without excessive friction. We don’t have to strain too much to see these conditions of modern war as conditions of the possibility of mass warfare that was eventually realized as the First World War, which I also call the first planetary-scale industrial war.
Clausewitz, fighting in the Napoleonic wars, was positioned to see the prehistory of industrialized warfare. A hundred years later, the prehistory of industrialized warfare eventually morphed into the history of industrial warfare in the strict sense. In my episode on Ernst Jünger I described industrialized warfare as a boundary condition out of which novel forms of modernity emerge. In particular, mechanized warfare is a boundary condition for an emergent form of heroism distinctive to mechanized warfare. Something qualitatively new had appeared in history, and this novel emergent generated a cluster of other emergents for which mechanized warfare was the boundary condition.
The conditions that Clausewitz described were the boundary conditions for industrialized warfare. Ernst Jünger was positioned to see and describe the emergence of true industrialized warfare, as Clausewitz was positioned to see its prehistory. The two authors testify to distinct periods in the development of planetary-scale industrialized warfare. This is a development that continues today, and continues to generate philosophical commentary on the novel emergents that have appeared in history as a result of industrialized warfare.
Today is not only the birthday of Clausewitz, it is also the 117th anniversary of the birth of Jan Patočka (01 June 1907 – 13 March 1977), who was born in Turnov, Bohemia, on this date in 1907. Patočka wrote a book on philosophy of history, Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, which was influenced by Husserl, Heidegger, and Hannah Arendt, among others. In the Fifth Essay: Is Technological Civilization Decadent, and Why? And especially in the Sixth Essay: Wars of the Twentieth Century and the Twentieth Century as War, Patočka discussed Ernst Jünger. I mentioned in my episode on Jünger that Jünger’s essay on total mobilization and his book The Worker was an influence on Heidegger, and Patočka too is interested in this work. Patočka’s description of the industrialization of Germany gives us the rational will and the organizational expertise to overcome the friction that Clausewitz saw as conditions of modern war:

“…Germany, for all its traditional structures, is the configuration that most closely approximated the reality of the new technoscientific age. Even its conservatism basically served a discipline that, contemptuous of equalization and democratization, vehemently and ruthlessly pursued the accumulation of building, organizing, transforming energy. Ernst Junger’s Der Arbeiter contains an implicit suspicion of the actual revolutionary nature of the old prewar Germany.! It is above all the ever deepening technoscientific aspect of its life. It is the organizing will of its economic leaders, its technocratic representatives forging plans leading inevitably to a conflict with the existing global order.”

Patočka also saw the orgiastic craziness of modern war that facilitated the mobilization of the energy of individual soldiers:

“War as a global ‘anything goes,’ a wild freedom, takes hold of states, becoming ‘total.’ The same hand stages orgies and organizes everydayness. The author of the five-year plans is at the same time the author of orchestrated show trials in a new witch hunt. War is simultaneously the greatest undertaking of industrial civilization, both product and instrument of total mobilization (as Ernst Jünger rightly saw), and a release of orgiastic potentials which could not afford such extreme of intoxication with destruction under any other circumstances. Already at the dawn of modernity, at the time of the wars of religion in the sixteenth. and seventeenth centuries, that kind of cruelty and orgiasm emerged. Already then it was the fruit of a disintegration of traditional discipline and demonization of the opponent though never before did the demonic reach its peak precisely in an age of greatest sobriety and rationality.”

It took the scientific and managerial resources of industrialized civilization—which Patočka and others call “technoscience”—to tame, and direct, and organize the orgiastic fury that was earlier released during the religious wars of the early modern period. I suspect that Junger would have largely agreed with this if he had read Patočka, and he could have read this since he lived longer than Patočka. It’s a bit more difficult to ascertain what Clausewitz would have thought of this.
To a certain extent it’s counter-intuitive to understand this orgiastic fury of warfare that Patočka described as a moral factor of war. We would perhaps like to think of the morality of war in terms of the various treaties like the Geneva Conventions that have attempted to moderate the brutality of armed conflict, or maybe the older framework of St. Augustines conception of a “just war.” There is, however, a wider sense of the use of the word “moral.” This wider sense of moral is less common that in the past. One could even say that this usage is becoming archaic. This is definitely is case with the idea of what were once called the moral sciences.The OED defines the moral sciences as:

(a) Those branches of knowledge which deal with the criteria of right and wrong;
(b) Cambridge University politics, philosophy, and economics, as a course of study.

This is now a defunct and archaic way to refer to the humanities and the social sciences. I suspect few if any university catalogs continue to use the moral sciences as a major division of the curriculum. But the idea of the moral sciences points to a wider sense of the term moral, and that is anything that engages specifically human responses to the world like politics, philosophy, and economics. In this context, moral doesn’t necessarily involve right and wrong, but it does involve what is human, all-too-human.
The Clausewitzean conception of war, which, as Raymond Aron said, was about introducing moral forces into our understanding of war, makes the study of war a moral science in this now archaic usage of “moral.” Clausewitz’s moral science of war is very close to what Ernst Jünger wrote about war being ultimately a spiritual endeavor. Patočka underlines this by recognizing the many social forces that came together to produce the wars of the twentieth century. Earlier I said that many philosophers have understood war as the engine that drives history forward. Patočka comes close to saying as much further along in his discussion of Jünger’s work:

“The first world war is the decisive event in the history of the twentieth century. It determined its entire character. It was this war that demonstrated that the transformation of the world into a laboratory for releasing reserves of energy accumulated over billions of years can be achieved only by means of wars. Thus it represented a definitive breakthrough of the conception of being that was born in the sixteenth century with the rise of mechanical natural science. Now it swept aside all the ‘conventions’ that inhibited this release of energy—a transvaluation of all values under the sign of power.” (Heretical Essays in the Philosophy of History, Sixth Essay, p. 124)

Clausewitz lived before this radical transvaluation of values, which is a phrase that Patočka has picked up from Nietzsche. Clausewitz belonged to the social order that was subsequently lost to the transvaluation of all values under the sign of power. He was there for the first stirrings of this transvaluation, but he did not see the completed arc of its development. Clausewitz’s traditionalism can be glimpsed in a document Clausewitz wrote in 1812—titled “Political Declaration” and published in Carl Von Clausewitz: Historical and Political Writings. Clausewitz wrote in the present tense, as a participant in historical events whose outcome was unknown as he wrote this account:

“The hatred that Napoleon bears toward the House of Hohenzollern is of course not obvious to everyone and not at all easy to explain. For some, however, it will be enough to know that at Tilsit a contemptuous coldness, indeed a suppressed hatred, could not be missed in the emperor’s personal conduct toward Frederick William III and his family, while the royal family's conduct toward Napoleon (thanks to a sense of dignity undiminished by politics!) had a more worthy and dignified bearing, which can of course enrage a vain and passionate man even more. There are also specific facts whose significance cannot be mistaken. The basis of Napoleon’s enmity probably lies above all in the liberality that characterizes the Prussian regime, which has attracted attention throughout Germany. Prussia, and particularly her ruling house, has public opinion on her side more than other states, and Napoleon is deeply hostile to this. The south German princes may be weary of French domination, but they have never been independent, they fear the vengeance of outsiders, and are without pride and self-esteem, half admirers and half flatterers of the French emperor. This is not the case with Frederick William III. This king, as everyone knows, is above all an upright man, incapable of hypocrisy: hatred of the French emperor is natural to him, and since he is sensitive and easily offended, his feelings are constantly inflamed by Napoleon’s abuses and can never grow numb. If he has refrained from expressing those feelings for political reasons (great self-possession being natural to him in any case), if he has admirably sacrificed his own dignity and that of his people in this regard, his reticence could never deceive the French emperor, and nothing is more natural than that Napoleon should have seen more deeply into the king’s heart than the king has into his.”

Here Napoleon is the upstart emperor who lacks the depth of dignity that the ancient family of the Hohenzollern possessed. Napoleon knew this, resented it, and the Napoleonic wars were one big cope-and-seethe because of it. The Hohenzollern represent the traditional aristocratic privilege that the French Revolution sought to overturn, and yet Napoleon and the Hohenzollerns found themselves forced into this diplomatic accommodation that both probably found distasteful. Napoleon was drawn into these ancient diplomatic traditions that the Revolution was in the process of sweeping away.
Not only was Napoleon draw into these ancient rituals of diplomacy, in having himself crowned emperor, he was effectively giving new life to these institutions, and the Hohenzollerns were drawn into paying their respects to a representative of the Revolution that would have done with them. For Clausewitz, the Hohenzollerns were an ancient aristocratic family reforming themselves and their kingdom along liberal lines, while Napoleon was the symbol of revolutionary change that threatened the established order of Europe. Patočka understood this, which why, in my earlier quote from him, he discussed the quasi-traditional, but, at the same time, the quasi-revolutionary nature of Imperial Germany, and Jünger’s response to this. This is not something I am prepared to exhaustively sort out, so I will leave it there for the moment.

Video Presentation

https://youtu.be/MAXr5Ze4bQg
https://www.instagram.com/p/C7s7dsjNGk5/
https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/carl-von-clausewitz%E2%80%99s-moral-science-of:f

Podcast Edition

https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/NHFPd3MM5Jb
https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/a31b8276-53cd-4723-b6ad-a39c8faa4572/episodes/a59ed23b-eeb4-4469-9380-952a76bcba08/today-in-philosophy-of-history-carl-von-clausewitz%E2%80%99s-moral-science-of-warfare
https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-today-in-philosophy-of-his-146507578/episode/carl-von-clausewitzs-moral-science-of-181857506/
​
​

At first, Joann Fouquette’s son, Ezra, was hitting all the milestones. It’s what every new mom hopes for: a happy, healthy baby.
But around 17 months, things started to change. He stopped speaking. He started covering his ears and hitting his head on the floor like something was bothering him.
Fouquette remembers her mom telling her, “I think we need to get him tested. There’s something definitely going on there.”
Five months later, in 2012, Ezra was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
“It’s devastating,” she told CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “I’ve heard people compare it to like losing a child. You lose the idea of the child that you were gonna have, the life that you were gonna have, the life that he’s gonna have.”
Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects 1 in 44 children in the United States, according to the CDC. It begins early in life, and the core symptoms are social and communication issues as well as repetitive behaviors and rigidity.
Children and adults with autism tend to have difficulties with verbal and nonverbal communication and social interactions, depending on the severity.
“These are people who have difficulty communicating – in particular socially. They may speak very well, but they can’t carry on a conversation. Then you have the opposite end of the spectrum, where you have children and adults who are entirely nonverbal,” said Dr. Doris Trauner, a pediatric neurologist and distinguished professor of neurosciences and pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego.
“They have a certain routine. They like to do things over and over again,” she told Gupta. “They have repetitive behaviors, the most typical of which are things like hand-flapping or spinning in circles.”
But autism can also lead to more troubling issues like severe disruptive behavior and self-harm.
“Aggression and self-injurious behaviors are unfortunately very common, especially in children with severe autism,” Trauner said. “Anything from repetitively banging their head against a wall to hitting their head with their hands to pinching themselves or biting their hands.”
Behavioral therapy, occupational therapy and speech therapy can help, but there are no US Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments for the core symptoms of autism.
There are two FDA-approved antipsychotic medications, used to treat bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, that are approved to treat children with autism, but only if they show severe aggression or self-injury.
“These medicines are effective for those symptoms but unfortunately are associated with significant side effects,” said Dr. Eric Hollander, director of the Autism and Obsessive Compulsive Spectrum Program at Montefiore Health System in New York. “It can predispose them to the development of things like diabetes or cardiovascular-type problems.”
“There’s an important need to develop new treatments, both to treat the core symptoms of autism … and to have less of a side effect burden,” he added.

Searching for answers

When it came to her son Ezra, Fouquette tried everything she could think of to help him.
“We tried gluten-free, casein-free, dairy-free. We’ve tried homeopathic remedies. We’ve tried every therapy out there,” she told Gupta.
But she didn’t want to give him psychotropic drugs when he started becoming more aggressive.
“I didn’t want to try any of those just because there were so many side effects,” she said. “But, at one point, I had a lot of bruises on me because he was getting more violent.”
Fouquette was desperate to find help. That’s when she saw a story on the local news about a clinical trial involving children with autism and CBD, the non-psychoactive part of the cannabis plant, at the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at UC-San Diego.
“He was 9 then,” she said. “What am I gonna do in the future as he continues to grow if I’m already having a hard time with his aggression now?”
Fouquette had no hesitations when it came to trying medical cannabis for her son.
“I’ve seen CBD used for kids with epilepsy,” she said. “I saw how much it helped other people, and I thought, ‘it’s all-natural. There may not be any real side effects with it. Why not try it?’ “
So she enrolled Ezra in the clinical trial.

Medical cannabis, autism and the brain

Trauner is the lead researcher for the UCSD trial, a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover study, which means the participants don’t know when they are receiving the placebo or the medicine, and neither do the doctors. Researchers are examining how CBD could affect the brains of children with autism.
“We know that in autism, there are some differences in brain chemistry. There are some changes in neurotransmitter systems, both in the dopamine system and in the serotonin system, that may contribute to some of the symptoms,” she told Gupta.
Serotonin and dopamine are neurotransmitters that carry signals, or information, from one nerve cell to another. Serotonin is thought to regulate mood and has a big effect on early brain development. Dopamine can reinforce behavior when we receive a reward.
Several studies have shown that dopamine levels that are either too low or too high in children with autism can cause certain areas of the brain to malfunction, resulting in high levels of repetitive behaviors and reduced levels of social interaction, Trauner said.
In animal models studying autism, serotonin levels in the brain may be lower than expected, and adding serotonin improves social functioning in mice, she said.
“And CBD, among many other things, does have effects on the serotonin system with increasing the availability of serotonin,” she added. “And that may be helping in terms of social interactions in particular.”
Across the country in New York, a similar trial, involving children and adolescents with autism and the cannabinoid cannabidivarin (CBDV), is also underway at Montefiore Health System.
“We know that autism is a developmental disorder that begins early on as the brain is being shaped,” said Hollander, the lead researcher on this double-blind placebo-controlled study.
“I think CBDV can play an important role in autism,” he said. “It can decrease excitation in neurons and increase inhibition.”
When children with autism are too excited or don’t have enough inhibition, it can lead to explosive behaviors, temper tantrums, rage or self-injury, and they can display repetitive behaviors, Hollander said.
“So it changes the ratio of excitation to inhibition in different neurons,” he said.
While both studies are still ongoing and the blinds have not been broken, early feedback has been positive.
“Some of the patients have had a really substantial benefit,” Hollander said. “We’ve seen what we had hoped, which was a significant decrease in the irritability symptoms, temper tantrums or explosive episodes. We have had patients who have had improvement in their repetitive behaviors, as well.”
In California, similar reports have come in from parents.
“We’re seeing some pretty impressive changes,” Trauner said. “Children whose aggressive behavior was daily, it’s gone away. I mean, gone away. … Children whose self-injurious behavior is better, and they’re to the point where the calluses on their wrists are starting to heal,” she said. “A lot of the kids are more social.”
But Trauner cautions that more research needs to be done.
“It’s too soon to get excited about it. I think there’s some reason for hope, but it’s not a good idea to run out and buy it and just try to use it on your own,” she said.
“There are several reasons for that. One is that it can be toxic. It can cause liver dysfunction,” she added. “It’s also not clear what dose is the best dose if it does work, and whether what you’re buying really has what you think it does, because it’s unregulated.”

‘I’m getting my boy back’

During the trial, Fouquette’s son Ezra received the placebo at one point and CBD at one point, but Fouquette and the doctors still don’t know when he was getting it.
Ezra was mostly nonverbal going into the trial, she said. But in the first few weeks, something remarkable happened.
“One day, I was at the grocery store, and my husband sent me a video. And it’s Ezra laying on the floor wrapped in a blanket, and he’s singing,” she said. “He had never sung before … and he’s singing the entire song.”
Fouquette told Gupta what was going through her mind at the time. “I’m getting my baby back. I’m getting my boy back,” she said, fighting back tears.
“I’m able to communicate with him. He’s talking to me. He’s happy. He’s not aggressive anymore. He’s singing,” she said. “What more could I ask for?”
Since Ezra finished the study a year ago, he has not shown any aggression and has continued to communicate.
“He has had no regression whatsoever,” she said. “It helped him … whatever is going on in his brain, make those connections that he needed to make. And once those connections were made, he never lost them.”
It’s not clear what role the treatment may have played in Ezra’s progress. The study hasn’t been published, and it wasn’t looking at whether cannabis or CBD could be neuroregenerative to the brain. More research is needed in this area.
“Some of the kids who’ve shown an effect … show it for several weeks after the study drug is taken away. And some seem to maintain some improvement,” Trauner said. “But I don’t know why that would be.”
Regardless of why it happened for Ezra, who is now 11, Fouquette is grateful.
“I don’t think it’s a cure. It gave him an ability to speak. It gave him an ability to communicate more. I think that’s why the aggression left,” she said. “It’s just going to make it easier for him – easier for him to live, easier for him to be himself.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/19/health/autism-medical-marijuana-cbd-weed-documentary/index.html

Below you will find a weekly reminder of our Rules and partial FAQ. It's definitely a long read, but it's worth your time, especially if you are new to the community, or dropping by as a result of a link you found elsewhere. We periodically revise our rules, this weekly notice will help keep you informed of any changes made.
NOTE: These rules are guidelines. Some moderation discretion is to be expected.

Community Rules

1. Kindness Matters

Advise, don't criticize.

• Post with empathy, thoughtfulness, and constructive commentary rather than judgment. Don't be an asshole.
• Name-calling, slurs (including gender or race based slurs), and insults towards other community members will not be tolerated. Do not attack others for their personally held values, custody situation, marital status, physical distance from stepkids, or economic status; or on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, age, religion, or ethnicity.
• No name-calling toward children, including the above-mentioned insults or the term "skids", or terms such as "mini-wife" or "mini-husband."
• Comments advocating spanking or any mention of wanting to harm children are not allowed.
• This is a support sub, not a judgement sub, assholes are not tolerated. Comments with terms used in other subs to pass judgement on assholes will be removed.

2. No Drama

This is a support sub.

• Bickering, nitpicking, and thread derailment will not be tolerated and will be subject to removal at moderator discretion.
• Do not repeatedly badger a poster demanding answers, or refuse to acknowledge an answer that's already been given.
• Do not use sensitive issues from past posts (either from this sub or other subs) to attack another user, as we are all discussing vulnerable topics.
• Crossposting anything from /stepparents to any other subreddit might result in a ban and may result in the original thread being locked. Brigading our sub will result in an immediate ban.

3. Report, Don’t Rant

No backseat modding.

• If you see someone breaking the rules, report the post or comment to the mods rather than engaging them in an argument. Failure to do so may be subject to comment removal at moderator discretion.
• No meta posts complaining about rude comments, DMs, or general sub issues.
• If you think someone is a troll or previously banned user, either use the report function or message the mods to direct their attention to the issue.

4. No Naming & Shaming

No userpings or links.

• Tagging/pinging users or other subreddits in an attempt to bully, harass, or complain will not be tolerated. Do not tag other subs, ever.
• If you want to complain about another subreddit being hostile to stepparents, do not name the subreddit. "Other parenting/advice/judgement subs" will suffice.

5. No Platitudes

Nobody knew what they were getting into.

• Comments like "You knew what you were getting into", "Love them, love their kids!", "They're a package deal!" and "You have to love them like your own!" will be removed.
• Comments suggesting that OP is not cut out for stepparenting will be removed at moderator discretion.
• Comments like "This is just a part of parenting, deal with it!" will be removed at moderator discretion.

6. No Trolling

We have zero tolerance for trolls.

• This is a support sub. Our subscribers do not have the time, nor inclination, to provide support to internet trolls. Posts that are suspected to be trolling attempts will be immediately removed, and the poster banned.
• Concern trolling, devil's advocating, gish-galloping, sealioning, and general asshattery are subject to immediate removal and banning without warning or notice.
• Any attempt to circumvent the ban by creating a new username will be reported to reddit admins and possibly result in account suspension.

7. No Personally Identifiable Information

Use discretion when posting.

• We highly recommend using a separate account for support subs to help prevent being doxxed. Do not post any information that may allow others to figure out your identity.
• Do not post photos of children, or any other photo that could be used to identify you or another user on the sub.
• Any image that contains a name or other identifying information should have the name or identifying information blurred out. This includes drawings, notes, and screenshots.
• Do not link to social media or any articles/blogs where you or another user on the sub is mentioned by name.

8. No More than 2 Posts per 24 hours

Use the daily threads.

• We are not a huge sub, but we are no longer a small sub. If you have multiple grievances to air, use the daily discussion threads instead of multiple posts.

9. Follow Reddiquette

Remember the human.

• Adhere to the same standards of behavior online that you follow in real life.
• Read it in full here.
• Downvoting is reserved for comments that don’t contribute, and shouldn't be used to indicate disagreement.
• If you believe someone is in violation of the subreddit rules, please either use the report function or message the mods to direct their attention to the issue.
• Suspected brigading will be reported to reddit admins.

10. No Porn, Spam, Blogs, or Research Studies/Surveys Without Mod Approval

Just don't.

• This is a SFW subreddit. Posting pornography will result in immediate post removal and permanent ban.
• Advertising on the subreddit (outside of Reddit's own advertising) is not allowed.
• No personal blog posts are allowed without express moderator permission.
• No advertising without prior mod approval.
• No asking for money/posting fundraisers/etc.
• For links to parenting research studies or surveys, please message the mods for permission before posting.

11. Disputes in Modmail Only

Don't argue with the mods on the sub.

• Any issues specifically related to how a mod is moderating should be addressed to the full moderating team via mod mail. This ensures that all mods are aware of any concerns and prevents disintegration of the topic thread at hand.
• This means to do not message or send chat requests to individual mods. All discussion and complaints about mod actions need to be done in mod mail ONLY. Failure to follow this rule can result in an immediate permanent ban.
• Comments in threads asking about mod decisions are subject to removal without notice.

12. Moderator Actions

We aren't kidding.

• Users are expected to know the rules before posting. If you are warned or banned for violating the rules, ignorance is not an excuse.
• Moderators will remove posts and comments and/or lock threads in accordance with the rules above. Typically this happens when threads have gone off-topic in a way that is not productive for the OP, or comments overall have become contentious or disrespectful.
• If a poster continues to argue or to willfully violate these rules, temporary and permanent ban procedures will be followed. Any attempts to avoid or bypass temporary bans will result in a permanent ban. User bans will not be discussed in the sub. Questions posted about user bans are subject to removal and the poster subject to warning/ban procedures. The mod team will not discuss a specific user ban with anyone other than the user involved.
• New accounts are subject to manual approval until they are no longer deemed "new" by the mod team. This helps to weed out trolls and ban evaders.
• We rely on Automoderator to scan for specific words and phrases that are not welcome here and notify the mod team to review the comment or post. This includes slurs of any type and platitudes such as "Love them as your own!"
• The mod team uses a combination of blacklisting and banning when dealing with trolls.
• We employ the use of a bot that automatically bans anyone who comments in subs that have historically harassed our users. If you are picked up by the bot for telling trolls to get fucked, reach out via mod mail and we'll get you sorted out.
• The rules above as well as ban procedures are considered guidelines only; some deviation may be necessary on a case by case basis and/or at the mod team's discretion.

13. Ban Procedure

These actions are at moderator discretion.

• Pornography will result in an automatic permanent ban.
• Extremely egregious content will result in an immediate permanent ban.
• You may receive a 7 or 30 day temporary ban for first and second rule violations, depending upon severity.
• Continued rule violations will result in a permanent ban.
• Willful attempts to avoid or bypass temporary bans will result in a permanent ban.
• We recognize the reddit site-wide rules of using alt names to get around bans and will ban those as well as report them to reddit admins.

​
​

FAQ - About the Rules

What does Kindness Matters mean?

• Shortest version? Don't be an asshole. People come here for support and advice, they do not come here to be yelled at or told they are the reason everything is going sideways. There are ways to point out that someone may want to do some reflection on their own actions and reactions without being an asshole about it.
• The purpose of this subreddit is to provide support and a sense of belonging for struggling stepparents. We aren't here to pass judgement, but rather to offer support, empathy, and constructive commentary. That does not include "hard truths" or "tough love." Stepparents get enough of that in every other subreddit, we're not passing it out here. Be respectful.
• Remember, most people aren't going to come to a sub like this when everything is going great and everyone is getting along. People are coming here when they are down, when they are feeling defeated and stretched to the limit. Kicking someone when they are down is shitty behavior and we don't tolerate it.

What about being kind to the kids?

• "Won't somebody think of the children?" Pearl clutching isn't needed here. If you read the Kindness Matters rule closely, you will see that there is a clause in there about name calling children. We don't allow it. We also don't allow people rolling in telling OP that they feel sorry for their stepkids because OP is feeling overwhelmed and overloaded.
• If anyone is advocating slapping, spanking, or any other form of violence, report the comment immediately. We do not advocate violence towards children of any sort. The mod team does not advocate any sort of physical punishment at any time.
• Venting about behaviors is not the same as insulting the kids. However, if you see a post or comment where kids are being name called or dragged to the point of no return, use the report button. We try to catch the posts and remove them before they hit the sub, but we cannot see every comment without your help. Use the report button to bring problematic comments to our attention. Don't engage in a war of words on our subreddit.

Why is this sub such an echo chamber?

• Not allowing contributors to pile on and tell OP that they are a terrible human being who should never be around children does not equate to being an echo chamber. Many contributors here will offer OP suggestions to help them work through their resentments and frustrations, and the most egregious situations are called out. We simply ask that it be called out with respect.
• If you feel that a post is simply too much for you to handle without following the rules, move on to another post.
• If you believe that a post itself is crossing the rules report it. If the mod team has approved the post, it is because the mod team believes that the OP needs help from the community or needs a moment to vent and move on from their vent. That does not give you license to pile on disrespectfully. Unless it is proven that OP is a bot, assume that OP is a human being with real thoughts and feelings and has posted from a place of vulnerability.

Why can't I tell OP that they are an asshole?

• Because this isn't a judgement sub. We aren't AITA, we don't want to be AITA.
• Comments with terms like YTA, NTA, ESH, NAH will be removed.
• Don't start your posts with INFO either. We generally recognize that as a fishing attempt for more information to pass judgement on OP, and again, we are not a judgment sub.

But OP asked if they were an asshole?!

• Their post somehow got past our automoderator. Just use the report button. We will address it with OP.
• If you've asked if you are an asshole, a-hole, a*hole, a**hole, whatever, don't be surprised if your post is removed without warning. This isn't a judgment sub. If you want judgment, you know where to go.

What is a gendered slur?

• While it seems that everyone understands what racist slurs are, people struggle understanding the concept of gendered slurs. Generally speaking, we are talking about derogatory nouns or verbs that are used to negatively describe people or situations based on gendered terms.
• We've gone back and forth on this a few times, and the truth is, we get it, it's your safe space and you want to be able to vent about BM/BD how you want to vent about them, without us telling you how to vent about them. Fair enough. Vent away. What we are going to stick to here how people are referring to other users and to stepchildren.
• Examples that are not allowed:
  • "My SD is such a little bitch."
  • "She dresses/acts like a slut."
  • "My SS acts like a pussy."
  • "My SS is such a beta male."
  • "You are all fucking whores."
  • "Any dude who is raising some sluts kids is a cuck!"
  • "Little Lord Fauntleroy over here thinking he runs the house!"
  • "You're just the bangnanny, get used to it."
• Don't call users here names, don't call stepchildren names.
• Masking the term with asterisks or other neat little tricks might get you around the bot, but if we see it, we're removing it and quite possibly giving you a time out. The intended word is still there and you deliberately tried to skate the rule.
• As there is not enough space to list every term that is offensive and does not belong, nor every situation in which term or phrase may be allowable in context, this rule is enforced based on moderator discretion.

Seriously? You are the language police now?

• We're here to talk about stepparenting. And we would like for that to happen in a respectful way. Attacking each other doesn't help. Belittling stepchildren draws in trolls who don't understand your frustration, all they see is an evil stepmonster talking shit on the internet about a poor, innocent baby. Yes, even if that "poor, innocent baby" just robbed you blind and set fire to the house on their way out the door. That's just how it goes.
• We are aware that this is a relatively new rule and a lot of older posts and comments contain a lot of problematic language, including some from mods themselves. We are growing and evolving, and rules change as the sub grows and evolves.

What does No Drama really mean?

• Pretty much what it says, do not bring drama from other subs into this sub. Do not engage in vote brigades. Do not try to incite other subscribers to riot in a different sub. Don't follow posters into this sub from other subs to continue to harass them. Do not badger someone or derail threads. Do not harass community members because you don't agree with them. There's enough drama in the daily lives of subscribers, more isn't needed.

What is thread derailment?

• When a comment chain has devolved to the point where all you are doing is arguing back and forth with someone about the same thing over and over again, you have derailed the thread. Also known as bickering. It's what children do. We assume if people are in a stepparent role they are adults. We expect you to act like it.
• If you aren't a stepparent, or in a stepparenting role, consider that perhaps this subreddit isn't for you. If you want to participate, do so with respect. Thread derailment, arguing, bickering, and nitpicking are not allowed.

But what if they didn't answer my question?

• No one has to answer your questions. This is a support sub, not an inquisition. Jumping on a bandwagon with "OP is evading the question" in a 20 comment long chain is the epitome of thread derailment. You'll find more information about trolling below and how this might be considered such.

Why am I being silenced? I'm just asking for a back and forth!

• Thread derailment, badgering, and nitpicking are considered harassment. Continued harassment of either community members or mods will get you banned.

Why can't I look at someone's post history and comment about it?

• No mod in the history of this sub has ever once said post histories are forbidden. What we do frown upon is using someone's post history to attack, belittle, or otherwise harass someone.
• Example Post: "My stepkid's mom really hates me. How can I make this better?"
  • Okay: "Based on the timeline and your post history, it looks like this may have started as an affair. Unfortunately there's going to be outstanding issues for a long time due to that. Try focusing on yourself and how you can move forward without worrying about how someone else feels about you."
  • Not Okay: "Holy shit! You were the OW! What the hell do you expect, homewrecker?!"
• Example Post: "I am completely overloaded and feeling very down about myself."
  • Okay: "In your post history you mentioned that your spouse wasn't really helping around the house. Has that changed at all?"
  • Not Okay: "LOL, you already got the answers you need in your post on relationships. You are stupid for sticking with your lazy spouse."

Why can't we crosspost stuff to other subs?

• We can't stop you from doing so. The problem isn't that something has been crossposted, it's when the community that it's been crossposted to feels the need to come over here and harass OP. When we see that happening, we lock the post and start passing out bans. If you did the crossposting, you'll be banned. If you participated in the brigading, you'll be banned.

What if it's my own post?

• Again, we can't stop you from doing so. We prefer that you don't technically crosspost, but rather just copy and paste your post. Why? Because inevitably the above will happen. Redditors from other subs will follow you back to /stepparents and start attacking users here. It just happens.

What is "brigading"?

• Reddit defines vote manipulation and brigading as follows:
• Using multiple accounts, voting services, or any other software to increase or decrease vote scores.
• Asking people to vote up or down certain posts, either on Reddit itself or through social networks, messaging, etc. for personal gain.
• Forming or joining a group that votes together, either on a specific post, a user's posts, posts from a domain, etc.
• We, along with pretty much every other subreddit that has ever had to deal with this nonsense, further define brigading as this: You saw a post on another sub that linked to our sub either via a link in a comment or a crosspost. It was basically saying something along the lines of "OMG, check out these assholes over on /stepparents! They literally hate all their stepkids!" And then you and your friends come over and start hammering on OP and telling OP how much they suck. Congrats, you have just participated in a brigade.

What is this whole Report, Don't Rant thing about?

• If you see a post or comment that breaks the rules, instead of engaging, report it. When you report it, it sends notification to the mod team. We will act on it where appropriate. Engaging with bad faith users may result in your comments being removed. If you repeatedly do so, you may end up being banned.

What if I see an obvious troll?

• Report it.

What if they are being really mean in comments?

• Report it.

What if they are harassing me in private messages?

• Step 1: Report them to admins. You can report harassment to reddit by using this link or send a DM to reddit admins. Include the link to the DM, admins can see your inbox and providing a direct link is helpful for them to weed out bad actors.
• Step 2: Block the person so they cannot directly contact you again.
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What do you mean by No Naming & Shaming?

• Just as we prefer to not be linked to or crossposted from, we do not allow linking to or calling out other subs by name. If you see something you want to share, say it's a hot post that has hit the front page and a stepparent is being absolutely flayed, just refer to it as "that hot post that hit the front page." If you want to complain about other places in general, "other parenting/advice/judgement subs" will suffice. Absolutely under no circumstances should you link to anywhere else.

I can't link to other subs?

• Do not directly link to another sub. (e.g.: "/insertsubnamehere is ridiculously hostile to stepparents!")
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I can't ping other users?

• Do not summon another user with a username ping/tag. (e.g.: "insertusernamehere was being an asshole.")
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What does No Platitudes mean?

• Sanctimonious, overused clichés that grossly oversimplify the stepparenting experience are neither wanted nor allowed here. We have all heard it a thousand times before, we don't need to hear it again. It's not nearly as insightful and wise as some would like to think.

Why don't you people understand it's a package deal?

• Any comment that suggests that OP should have known what they were getting involved with, or that they needed to understand that the kids were part of some package they needed to accept before signing up for marriage is subject to immediate removal.
• This is one of the most insensitive things you can say to a stepparent. Most stepparents were aware of the children, but they were probably not aware of all of the family dynamics.

Why can't you just love them like they are your own?

• Demanding that a stranger you do not know love children that are not biologically theirs as if they were theirs can be incredibly damaging to someone who is already in a vulnerable situation. Any comment that falls along these lines will be removed.

What do you mean by No Trolling? I was just...

• No means no. No trolling. No pretending to be a stepparent and then whipping out the Greatest Hits Bingo Card of The Worst Stepparent in the History of Stepparents. We see you. We've seen you a thousand times.

What does "concern trolling", "gish-galloping", and "sealioning" have to do with stepparenting? This isn't a debate sub, why are you using debate terms?

• That's absolutely right, this isn't a debate sub. And yet, here we are, day after day, having to defend ourselves against this sort of thing. So, enough. No more. Usage of any of these things will get you banned.

What is "Concern Trolling?"

• A concern troll is someone who disingenuously visits sites of an opposing ideology to disrupt conversation by offering unwanted advice on how to solve problems which do not really exist.
  • Example Post: OP expresses concern that she will feel, and possibly act, differently towards her stepchildren after her husband decides that no, he doesn't want anymore children after all.
  • Example Concern Troll pulled from actual mod mail after their comment was removed: "Possible child abuse claims need to be sorted out well before whatever empathy you believe the OP was looking for."

What is a "Devil's Advocate"?

• "I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but have you considered that maybe BM is just really tired and needs a break, too?" BM has dozens of different mom based subs alone on reddit she can complain on, this sub is for stepparents. The stepparent doesn't need to consider that maybe BM is just really tired and needs a break.

"Gish-galloping?" What does that even mean?

• The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a conveyor belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it's unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop.

And "sealioning?" What's that?

• Sealioning involves jumping into a conversation with endless polite, reasonable questions and demands for answers, usually of entry-level topics far below the actual conversation (e.g. "please prove sexism exists"). This tactic differs little from harassment; instead of discussion, the point is to derail discussion, receive criticism (for their ignorance) so as to look like a victim, or to make someone feel overwhelmed and quit talking.

Who gets to define what is considered asshattery?

• The mod team, of course! If we feel that comments are out of line, are trolling, are leading up to a fight or "just asking questions", we are going to remove them and most likely ban the offender.

​
​

FAQ - Sub Questions

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Posting Guidelines for Bioparents

• Stepparents is a support community for stepparents, by stepparents. As bioparents, you may want to have more insight into how the stepparent in your life feels or thinks. You may have questions on how to ease the transition for your partner. However, please keep in mind that this community was not created for you. It was created for your partner or your ex's partner. If you are seeking support on how to deal with a stepparent, there are other subs more suited for your situation and your post is subject to removal.
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What the heck are all these acronyms? I'm confused!

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Platinum End Theory: Who Is God And Those Mysterious Beings In The Finale Explained
Original link- https://reddit.com/platinumend/comments/sdw2rc/deleted_by_use
Repost cause the original was deleted. I'm not OP. OP is https://www.reddit.com/usemuphenz
Deleted Theory https://www.reddit.com/platinumend/s/b347iH85A7
Thanks https://www.reddit.com/usecompletelylostcase for the Pastebin link. https://pastebin.com/A8K4bJiD
DISCLAIMER: This theory will go over the entire story of Platinum End, so obvious spoilers ahead.Just a heads up, this theory is posted at the time that only a few episodes of the anime have been released. Depending on how much the anime stays like the manga, details may end up changing. Therefore, the entire theory will be based solely on the manga. I will also leave snippets of the manga with the highlighted text to support my claim. Please be sure to read those as it will help this theory make sense. This theory is completely my own original thoughts. If anyone shares this, please be sure to credit me, Muphenz. Thanks! Hello, my fellow Platinum End fans! If you’re like me, the ending completely caught me off guard and left my head-scratching. Do not worry! I’ve overanalyzed everything and made a theory to possibly explain who god and those beings at the end of the story are, so you don’t have to. Those beings at the end of the manga, chapter 58, are drum roll…humans of the future who have achieved many scientific advancements who existed well before the story of Platinum End takes place and are simulating their own world with fake humans, fake angels, and a fake god. Why are the real humans running this simulation? Simply put, they’re suicidal and no amount of therapy is going to help with that. Why are they wanting to die? In the future, it is predicted by Gaku Yoneda that within 500 years, humans will achieve immortality. Once they achieve immortality, they will eventually master time and space and will be able to do things like teleport, time travel, see the future, etc. And once humans achieve immortality and are able to know all of the future, they will discover that the future cannot be changed according to Dr. Yoneda. Just like Dr. Yoneda’s prediction, the real humans are wanting to die which is why it’s stated by one of the real humans how annoying it is that there is no death. Whatever the process was that made the real humans immortal, it seems that it cannot be reversed to restore one’s mortality. Although it’s not stated how humans will achieve immortality and allow them to control time and space, this will somehow cause humanity’s apocalypse as well, destroying the original Earth. What makes these creatures more human-like than god-like is that they admit they were born on another planet, most likely the original Earth. They are also aware that they too were created by something that is above them. How do we know Dr. Yoneda’s predictions are right? It was stated by Shuji Nakaumi that his past predictions came true. One thing to understand about science is that it’s extremely good at accurately predicting things. Example 1: With Issac Newton’s law of motion, scientists can predict the position of an object at any specific time, past, present, or future. Example 2: In the 1840s, Fitzner astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was analyzing the orbit pathway of Mercury and found that it is changing very slowly over time. With technology limited at that time, it was hard to provide proof. In 1915, the famous German physicist, Albert Einstein was able to calculate the influence of the curved space in Mercury’s orbit. That is 75 years later that science proved its prediction was right. Although science cannot tell future events like a psychic will attempt to, I believe this is what the author was using to help advance the plot for the ending. The real humans already know the future and they’re aware that no matter what they try, death is not a part of that. If they cannot do it, someone else can. That is when these simulations come in. The real humans will create simulated humans. In one of the simulations, the story of Platinum End takes place. This would not be on a computer. This process would involve terraforming an entire planet to support carbon-based life. The planet that the simulated humans live on will be similar to the original Earth as well as the history and advancement of science will be similar to the real humans. As the simulated human’s society progresses, like in Platinum End, they would eventually learn how to become immortal and learn how to control space-time which would lead to them wanting to die just like the real humans. But unlike the real humans, the simulated ones may actually achieve a way to kill themselves once they obtain immortality that the real humans could use. But as we already know stated by the real humans, this specific simulation was a failure. Nothing was created that was capable of killing them. Thus, the real humans will move on to a new simulation. Pay very special attention to this picture. Notice right after all of the humans disappear when the fake god kills himself, the buildings are slowly crumbling away since no one is here to maintain them. According to World Building, it would take an average of 250 years for a building to start to break apart since materials like wood and plastic would be destroyed by the environment if not maintained. Metal would be expanding and no longer able to keep the building's structure in place. This would cause things like windows to fall off and shatter. So after a few hundred years, the real humans return to the planet after the simulated humans disappeared due to the fake god’s suicide. It’s possible that during this time they’re running other simulations on other planets and returned when this simulation was completed. Since the real humans have achieved master over space-time, teleporting to anywhere in the universe would not be out of the question. Since they cannot die, the amount of time it would take for the real humans to travel anywhere in the universe is irrelevant as well. Even though Gaku Yoneda’s predictions about the simulated humanity’s end were wrong, he was technically right. It did come true for the real humans. If Shuji Nakaumi, as the fake god, did not kill himself and wipe out all of the fake humans, they would of most likely learned how to cheat death and to control space-time in the future. Gaku was wrong about the fake god being a product of human belief in order to live. He even admits that the composition of the fake god was wrong. If the fake god required human belief to live, then Shuji would not have erased the memories of those who were not god candidates as it would have affected the fake god's existence if fewer people believed in him. There is one thing that begs the question. Why is a fake god needed to run these simulations? Why do the simulated humans have souls? Why not just create the simulated humans and leave them to figure out how to create an immortal killing machine without the process of a false god? This is because God and souls are actually real and are necessary for life to exist. To clarify, the “God” that Shuji Nakaumi was transmuted into is not the true God that I’m referring to. I’m referring to the first cause of everything, a self-aware creator, a deistic God who existed before time and space who created the universe and does not intervene in its creation. This means no miracles, prophecy, answering prayers, divine revelation, etc. Everything in the universe is governed by physics and these laws cannot be broken. The real humans who are running the simulations are aware that they are a creation made from a creator. However, since a deistic God does not interfere in the universe, the real humans cannot know of him, at least while they are still alive. Considering the real humans can control space-time, I can say for certain at one point, at least one person went to the very beginning of time and saw something that would be evidence of an intelligent designer creating the universe. When the real humans are conversing with each other at the finale, one human suggests identifying what created them and the second one replies that seeking their creator will be a waste of time. If a deistic God won’t intervene in its creation, the real humans would be wasting time by attempting to contact him. Even though they can control space-time, if the creator exists outside of reality, they would not be able to reach this entity. Focusing on figuring out who created them means that time is wasted if they're not figuring out how to die which is why it would take them further away from death. Just as the simulated humans have souls, the real humans also have souls. At some point, the real humans discovered the soul. They are aware that this is needed for life to be sentient. The discovery of the soul could have played a key part in the real humans achieving immortality. The fake god is engineered by the real humans to create souls so that life can be sentient, mimic the universe's deistic God by allowing the simulation to run with no interference, and act as a mod to keep an eye on life with the red and white arrows. The celestial realm was created so the fake god would not be a part of the simulated world. Even though time moves differently in the celestial realm, it is the closest thing that the real humans can engineer to simulate a deist God that is separated from its creation. This fake god does not have the powers of a supreme being. The fake god does not know everything, is not everywhere at once, and does not display any sort of omnipotent ability. There is a lot of things that the fake god admits to not knowing, such as who created him, why are souls preserved, and how long does the merging process take. Although we do see the fake god have the ability to observe humanity, I would say that this is the equivalent of having admin privileges to watch humanity live-streamed on YouTube. The fake god is aware that he is created by someone. The fake god noticed that there are things that had already been created that he was not a part of just by observing everything in the universe. Although he seems to not understand what created him. He even acknowledges the idea that humanity could have created him. All the simulated souls come from the fake god. This is done through a process of emanation, which means to flow from. In the Abrahamic religions, specifically Gnosticism, Jewish Mysticism, and certain sectors of Protestantism, instead of your typical creator being separate from its creation, everything is a spontaneous outflow from God. As pieces of God emanate from him, it becomes less divine, but these pieces will eventually become an individual soul that forms into human spirits, angels, demons, as well as other things that come into reality such as heaven, hell, and the world of the living. Eventually, everything that came from God, will return back to the creator. (If you’re still confused on what emanation is, I would do more research before continuing to read as this will play a key role in understanding who the fake god is.) Emanation is how the fake god created the simulated human and their soul, the fake angels, and the celestial realm. The fake god took a piece of himself and used it to create life. Since everything emanates from the fake god is connected to him, as he is dying, most of the angels are dying too. Due to this connection, when the fake god killed himself, everything that was tied to the fake god disappeared. But because the creation of the fake god is not connected to the physical world, the planet and everything that is not life remained on it. When the simulated human beings die, the soul goes to the celestial realm. This is the returning aspect of emanation. The souls that came from the fake god are returning back to him. You always see all angels, regardless of rank, having the task of carrying the souls to the celestial realm. It seems that the main purpose of the angels is to help with the return part of the emanation process. The more that the emanence is divided, the less divine it becomes. This is why the fake humans are considered sub-celestial in the hierarchy.It appears that there is a certain order to the flow of emanation. The newest creations emanate from the fake god. Kids will be the first in the line for the emanate process and their parents will be behind them. This is why when the fake god committed suicide, the kids were the first ones to disappear, then the adults. All things that emanate from the fake god are returning to the original source in reverse order when the fake god takes his own life. When the fake god merges with a human, this appears to go against the set pattern of the emanation process by breaking the order in which the emanence flows. This is why when Shuji merged with the fake god, it felt like there was something foreign in the fake god's body similar to how an infected person's body acts when the immune system detects foreign bacteria or a virus. The only way to get around it is by the fake god merging with a simulated human and having the fake god take over the new body when the fusion is completed. It is stated by the fake god that it is nothing more than humanity's assumption that God cannot die. This may be true for the deistic God, but not for a fake god. It is already known that the real humans achieved immortality. Although the fake god could have been engineered to be immortal, that would just create another being who would eventually want to die. The fake god was designed to live a long life, compared to humans, that could be extended through the process of merging with one of its emanated counterparts until the simulation was completed. This has been done throughout time in the form of the god choosing process. The fake god confirmed to Shuji that his purpose was to create life. Professor Yoneda confirmed that the fake god was created by human imagination and that its purpose was to end life. On the surface, this may seem like a contradiction. But both of them are right. The fake god’s purpose was to create the simulated humans. God is metaphorically a creation of human imagination. It was not by the simulated human’s imagination as stated by Yoneda, but it was designed and engineered by the minds of the real humans. Since the purpose of the simulation is for the fake humans to achieve immortality and figure out how to reverse it, you can say that the fake god is a part of that process of killing humanity. Right as all of the humans are disappearing, Dr. Yoneda realizes that the composition that makes up the creature is based on a science that the simulated humans have not discovered yet. The composition of the fake god is Aether. In medieval times, a common study among scholars is alchemy, which can be best described as the forerunner for modern-day chemistry mixed with the pseudoscience of metaphysics. According to Charles Gillispie, a historian at Princeton University, in his book, The Edge of Objectivity, An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas, Aether is the fifth element, along with earth, wind, fire, and water, that are the basic building blocks of the universe. During medieval times, Aether is the substance that is believed to connect the physical world to the spiritual one. It was even a common belief that the Abrahamic God was surrounded by Aether and that all of the angels, demons, and souls that dwelled in the afterlife breathed it in as humans breathed in the air. According to Jakob Bernoulli, a mathematician from the 1600s, believed that Aether is what allowed souls to interact with their human bodies. All of these characteristics of Aether match the composition of the fake god. Aether is what allows life to become sentient, connecting all of the simulated humans back to the fake god from the physical world to the celestial realm. It seems at some point, the real humans discover this element. This discovery most likely led to the discovery of the soul. Using this element, the real humans used Aether to construct the fake god needed for the simulations. Everything that is a part of the simulation, the fake god, angels, the soul, the arrows, is made up of this element. The red arrow is what allows the god candidates to make other humans fall in love with them so much that the person who is under the influence of the arrow will do literally anything the person who is in control wants, even die for them. The white arrow has the ability to kill any life while all inanimate objects are unaffected. These were limits placed on the arrows by the fake god. According to Ogaro, the fake god can use the full power of the arrows at will. The red arrow is more than just making someone fall in love. The arrow does this by taking away their free will. The god candidates were limited to using the arrow on 14 people at once for a period of up to 33 days. With the fake god able to use the full power of the red arrow, he can enslave any or all simulated humans with a snap of his finger for as long as he desired. The red arrow also played a role in creating the first simulated life as well. The fake god stated that if life was left alone, it would multiply. The desire of falling in love and wanting to procreate was implanted by the red arrow when life was created. The white arrow is the opposite of the red arrow. This arrow can kill life instantly. The limit that was placed on this arrow is that only one white arrow can be shot at a time. Just like the red arrow, this arrow has a maximum range of 31.6 meters. When cycling the white arrow, there is a cool down period of 0.3 seconds. If these limiters are removed, the fake god can kill all humans with the white arrows with virtually no limit on distance, any number of arrows can be used simultaneously, and there would be no mandatory cool down period. The creation of the simulated humans involves two key ingredients. The first is the soul which comes from the fake god. The second is a physical body for the soul to be attached to. The real humans asked if it was worth planting another seed and another god as those are two separate things. The making of another god is obviously the fake god. But what is the seed? The seed is what makes the physical embodiment of all plants and animals that all emanence is attached to. I.E., souls attached to bodies. According to the fake god, before he created life on the fake Earth, there was some sort of micro-organism. This seed would be that micro-organism, specifically carbon-based bacteria that is capable of evolution. Around 3 billion years ago, the first life on Earth was bacteria. There are two types of bacteria, a classification of anaerobic bacteria that ate other organic compounds and simple sugars to survive. The other kind is autotrophs bacteria which is capable of self-feeding. Anaerobic bacteria would evolve into modern-day animals. Autotroph bacteria would evolve into modern-day plants that still have the ability to self-feed through a process of photosynthesis. It is possible to send bacteria through space. According to a 2020 study published in the Journal of Frontiers in Microbiology, bacteria were able to survive in space for three years. If the real humans were able to transport the seed through space in less than 3 years, it could easily survive. Considering they achieved immortality, it is within reason to think this would be a piece of cake for them. At some point, part of the anaerobic bacteria would come in contact with the fake god, who was on the fake Earth at that time to make life, recognized the fake god as food, and attempted to feed off of him to survive. The bacteria that fed off the fake god would eventually evolve into Nasse. The bacteria that did not feed off of the fake god would evolve into more complex forms of life on the fake Earth. Since Nasse was accidentally created from this event, it most likely means that she is the first angel that the fake god created. This means that she could serve as inspiration for the fake god to create angels for the celestial realm. The angels don't seem to share any ability to reproduce with each other. There is never any mention of any family heritage. It means that all of the angels were created around the same time. Since Nasse is the only angel that came from the seed/bacteria, her biological makeup differs from all the other angels. While the majority of her is angel, part of the genetic makeup is similar to carbon-based life. Although I would not say Nasse is an angel-human hybrid, she could be considered a type of Nephilim. Due to this biological difference, Nasse is the only angel that can interfere in both the physical world and the celestial realm. Much research has shown that facial expressions are innate among all animals, not just humans. The same animals that display facial expressions when expressing emotions, lying, determination, etc. use similar muscles in the face as humans do. For example, a Psychologist, Paul Ekman, studied facial expression from hours of film and ventured on to multiple isolated tribes who have very little contact with modern society. He showed them pictures of facial expressions and asked them to interpret them. These people were able to match facial expressions and their meaning with high accuracy. This is one of the many studies that show facial expressions are genetic. Even though Nasse is single-minded, she is able to understand facial expressions due to her biological relationship with the simulated life on the fake Earth. But hey, this is just a theory."

So, as the title suggests, this is my idea for the Indigo Park Timeline and Lore, including the time before, and the game's events. This will be one of three parts due to character limitations, this part dealing with the time before the events of the game.
BEFORE THE GAME
So, this game is clearly based loosely on Disney, if it wasn't obvious enough: a man by the name of Isaac Indigo opening Indigo Park (Walt Disney, Disney World, self-explanatory), starting out with cartoons in the early 1900s.
Mr. Isaac Indigo started out his business ventures in the cartoon sphere, specifically with Lloydford L. Lion, or more commonly known as Lloyd the Lion. The reason that it's Lloyd specifically, and not anyone else, can be seen when interacting with the Retro Lloyd Plush, both from the protagonist and Rambley the Raccoon, the modern day representative of Indigo Park.
Protagonist in regard to the Retro Lloyd Plush: "Lloyd obviously had an older look in the classic Indigo cartoons, but I'm not sure it looked like this. I guess nostalgia sells..."
Rambley AI in regard to the Retro Lloyd Plush: "Ugh...I don't get why we even have those. And why did they only make one of LLOYD? Is it because he's the loudest? I CAN BE LOUD TOO! WHERE'S MY LIMITED-EDITION THROWBACK PLUSH?! WHERE'S MOLLIE'S? WHERE'S FINLEY'S?"
Protagonist in regard to the Lloyd Plush: “I feel like as a kid, Indigo used Loyd a lot more.”
If it wasn't obvious enough by Rambley's rather frustrated demeanor regarding the plush, only Lloyd received this sort of plush, while none of the others received such a collectible. Well, it's possible Salem the Skunk received one, since Rambley didn't mention her, but that might be more representative of his intense dislike for Salem, something that will be discussed down the line. Another thing to note is that this plush does not look like the original Lloyd Lion, which is a detail I will discuss in depth towards the end.
Anyways, over the years, the other mascots we know and love, Mollie the Macaw, Finley the Sea Serpent, Salem the Skunk, and Rambley the Raccoon are added. I would like to put forth the idea that Mollie, Salem, and Rambley were all added in the same general time period, thanks to the Rambley Rush Arcade Game.
The quick rundown of the game is thus: Mollie Macaw crashes somewhere in the depths of Rambleberry Woods, and Rambley goes to find her. Along the way, he must jump across rivers and pits, collecting Rambleberries, and stomping upon evil purple squirrels, eventually reaching Mollie, who is still near her crashed plane. When she gets up, she claims that she crashed because her vision became rapidly obscured, at which point Salem Skunk appears and takes credit for that, claiming that she needed better test subjects for her potions than a bunch of squirrels. Infecting Mollie with the potion, Salem flees, not before Rambley and Salem exchange some barbs. Rambley eventually knocks Mollie out by stomping on her a few times, and the game glitches and crashes.
This arcade game is important for several reasons, one of which is that it introduces us to the dynamic that Rambley and Salem have: one of enemies, different than with Lloyd, because Rambley is merely jealous of the fact that Lloyd came before him, and was the main character for a long period of time. There is also the fact that Salem's area in the Rambley Railroad is completely destroyed. Not even Lloyd's area is so damaged.
From my basic understanding of early black and white television, based on the Chapter 1 opening cutscene of Isaac Indigo, Indigo Park opens somewhere in the 1940s to 1950s, as the grainy, blurry footage and somewhat muffled audio is reminiscent of such times. All sorts of rides and attractions are available for families to explore, such as Rambley's Railway, Jetstream Junction, Oceanic Odyssey, and Lloyd's Main Stage Theater. Again, interesting to note that Salem doesn't have such an area dedicated to her, though that might just be a way of putting off that area for later in the game. People in costumes (note, not called Mascots themselves, as I will use the term to address the replacements of these costumes) roam about the place, likely acting like modern day Disney Cast Members do today, interacting with guests in character.
After a long period of time, and possibly into the early 2000s, the focus is drawn away from Lloyd and onto Rambley, and specifically after the park was open, and not before, because in that same commercial that I dated to approximately the 1940s or 50s, the front gates are decorated with artwork of Lloyd, which is different than in game, where the Lloyd artwork has been replaced by art of Rambley. The reasoning for this is unclear, though I do have a few speculations. It is noted, both by the Rambley AI and the protagonist when interacting with the limited Golden Rambley Plush, that the idea is kind of cheap.
Protagonist: "So wait. They were so money hungry that they just recolored a regular Rambley plush and called it a new product? Kinda lazy don't you think?"
Rambley AI: "... Seriously, our employees had to clean up SO many stray teeth and nails. Hard to believe that there was all this demand for a regular Rambley Plush we blasted with gold spray paint..."
The idea of cutting corners and lowering costs comes up a fair bit. This might be the reason that they swapped main characters, after all: it's easier to animate a cute, small raccoon with a bandana than a large lion in a full on suit. This might also be the reason that the park transitions from costumed staff members, or "Ranglers", to Mascots.
Another reason for the change could have been growing awareness of animal welfare issues at the time, with many circuses and zoos facing criticism for how they treated their animals, lions and elephants specifically, and is an issue that is still ongoing, so perhaps Indigo Park didn't want the negative press to come to them, so they swapped. However, it is important to note that these are purely my speculations, and no concrete reason for the swap was ever introduced in Chapter 1 (to my knowledge).
A third possible reason could be in reference to what Indigo Park represented, at least in the time that it was built. According to Isaac Indigo:
Isaac Indigo, giving a press conference outside Indigo Park: “Indigo Park offers a slice of the American dream to call your own. In this place, echoes of days gone are brought back to life as a new generation captures a glimpse of the exciting potential of Tomorrow. Indigo Park pays homage to the values, dreams, and unwavering truths that gave rise to our great nation.”
Let’s take a step back. Remember how I dated the opening of Indigo Park to the 1940s or 1950s? If that was true, that means that Indigo Park opened in the shadow of the Second World War, the deadliest human conflict ever recorded, with a death toll of over 50 million people, both soldier and civilian. After the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, it was eventually public knowledge that the USA still decided to drop the second one, even after Imperial Japan had surrendered after the first one had been cast.
It's entirely possible that Indigo Park was, in some way, propaganda. Think about it, Lloyd the Lion was the mascot. And what do lions represent? Strength, power, unity, leadership. Lloyd could have been a symbol to the American people that proclaimed themselves as leaders, people who thought of the future, while trying to sideline the negative press the USA received.
After a while, however, there was no need to justify their victory. People, for the most part, accepted their victory, and as the world headed into a Cold War, there was no need to justify themselves; many people were afraid of the Communists, the Red, and the influence it may have. Clearly, the USA and its allies were the good guys. Communism was a threat to democracy, everyone knew that! So there was a switch to a more child friendly character, Rambley, as the main man himself.
That might also explain why the retro plushie doesn’t look like how Lloyd did in the old cartoons, as stated explicitly by the protagonist; perhaps that older Lloyd was more mature, older, and signified some much darker. There’s no need to stir up bad memories of WW2, so they changed his design to be softer, younger, much more unassuming.
The Protagonist, regarding the Retro Lloyd Plushie: “I always find it weird when companies make merch that’s supposed to look old. Lloyd obviously had an older look in the classic Indigo cartoons, but I’m not sure Lloyd looked like this.”
There’s also a case to be made that Disney also participated in some good old propaganda of their own, mocking Nazi Germany and their ideals.
Now, disregarding politics, because that thing is a minefield to safely navigate, this is just my theory. I am not trying to radicalize the game, and if you hate this theory, you can go about ignoring it! I personally don’t think it’s the correct answer, just a potential answer.
Another change that soon occurred was the change from costumed "Ranglers" to living, breathing, flesh and bones Mascots, introduced to us in the Rambley AI interaction with the Rambley mask.
Rambley AI, playing an old tape in the database in regard to the costumes: "First Person - Hey Jackson! You hear about the new mascots? Jackson - Yeah, you think it will put us out of a job? First Person - I think so, Old Sport, and right after we got this damn raccoon costume."
An important note to this is that this interaction is considered an Easter Egg to a FNAF fan game called Dayshift at Freddy's, alongside some other references such as the Golden Rambley being a reference to Golden Freddy, and the Poodle Plush being a reference to another FNAF fan game Playtime with Percy. Despite this, these items seem to carry a bit of significant lore in them, something that I think is an interesting way of hiding it. It opens up the possibility to state that it should be disregarded, since it's supposed to be an Easter Egg to something else, but I don't think so.
This quote makes me think that the switch from costumes to Mascots happened quite early on in Indigo Park's lifetime, considering it's said that the Mascots should appear quite soon after the introduction of the costumes, perhaps yet another clue that Indigo Park was looking to cut costs. After all, why pay people when you can have Mascots roaming about, doing just the same, if not better, of a job?
And everything seems to be going fine for quite a while. The protagonist notes several times that his family, and especially his mother and himself, were avid fans of the place and characters, his mother liking Mollie Macaw the most, while the protagonist favored a few, such as Lloyd the Lion, while disliking Finley due to his large size, which was revealed when interacting with a few different collectibles.
When the protagonist interacts with the Lloyd the Lion plush: "I feel like as a kid, Indigo used Lloyd a lot more. He was always one of my favorites."
When the protagonist interacts with the Mollie the Macaw plush: "I remember when my mom took us to the parks one summer. Her favorite was always Mollie, so when they first opened new Mollie Meet & Greet in Jetstream Junction, we were some of the first in line."
When the protagonist interacts with the Rambley Ears: "My dad promised me he'd buy me a pair when we went."
When the protagonist interacts with the Souvenir Rambley Cup: "When I was a kid they used to have free unlimited refills on those things. I once drank so much Bird Up that I got sick and threw up while riding Rooftop Races. That poor kid behind me..."
Anyways, we got the point: the family went there often and were huge fans of the park. What could go wrong?
Well, apparently a huge evacuation and closure of the park with no explanation whatsoever, to the point where the authorities also were not able give any reasoning or answers.
This comes from the newspaper we see in the beginning cutscene, after the old video of Isaac Indigo introducing Indigo Park. So, let's theorize a bit. Out of everything in the park, what could possibly lead to such a drastic evacuation of a place so well loved? Oh, I don't know, maybe the killer Mascots that try to kill you in Chapter 1 ...
What isn't so clear is what happened to them. Clearly, they were well behaved and safe to be around, even for small children, as the park remained open for 50 years (minimum) without issue, and almost as long with the actual mascots themselves. Obviously, they went rogue, as can be seen when the protagonist has to run away from Lloyd the Lion's attempts to attack and have the Rambley AI save the protagonist from the Mollie the Macaw by killing the Mascot with a metal door. I don't think it had to do with resources such as food, since the Mascots remained by themselves in the park for 2920 days, exactly eight years, and only seemed feral. Besides that, we see a bunch of vendor stations and a few cafes, still with food in them. Moldy, perhaps, and expired, but there's still food. There's also water (possibly) available in those self serve drinking fountains. The last time the park was operational was October 7th, 20XX (with the exact year being a mystery), and the reason I say operational is because of an announcement seen on one of the Rangler monitors in the reception area.
Announcement: "Attention Ranglers. The date is October 7th, 20XX. Charge guests the SATURDAY pricing indicated in your Rookie Rangler Handbook! Thanks! - Management."
What jumps out immediately is the way Saturday is so bold. So, what can we assume? The last operational day we have knowledge of was Saturday, October 7th, somewhere in the 2000s. Unless this is the future (which we have no reason to believe), we can assume this Saturday occurred somewhere between 2000 and 2023 (2023 and not 2024 because the creator, in a livestream, ended up giving a vague message of the game taking place in 2023). Looking up old calendars and looking specifically for an October 7th that lands on a Saturday reveals a couple potential years: 2000, 2006, and 2023. We can discount 2023, as we know the park was closed for 8 years. I did try to find a date on those three monitors the protagonist uses in the opening cutscene, but only found the time, 7:32 pm. Unfortunately, Harmony, a knock off of Discord (antonyms) also doesn't have a date, or even a time, for that matter. And besides, we know that we're the first actual person to visit in quite some time. So, we're left with 2000, and 2006. Assuming this game takes place in 2024, I have a feeling the year it closed is actually 2006.
First foremost because of the Rambley AI. Having AI Rambley be as advanced as he is makes it seem like the park was closed in 2023, but again, there is no evidence to say the game takes place in the future. And AI's back in 2000s and 2010s eras were good, but nothing like we have today. They were capable of basic object identification, and navigation, but the capabilities were limited, compared to today. And in 2000, it was much more basic. Image recognition consisted of identifying edges. That's it. Edges, not distinct features, and even then, the accuracy was pretty bad. At the time, AI was mainly used for data retrieval and predictive modeling, mostly for things like language translation, text classification, and such. They were basically office assistants.
Of course, that's assuming that the AI was introduced back then. It is entirely possible, and likely plausible, that the AI was introduced later. After all, the park may have closed, but Ranglers were still visiting the place as late as 2015, which was the last time the AI Rambley notes an actual person arrived. So, if that's true, then I am still not too sure as to which of the two years the park closed.
Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. And the present of the game and my conclusions shall be posted in separate posts, as there is a 40k character limit. Leave any theories of your own in the comments, and I'll be happy to theorize regarding and questions or concerns yall have!

I just finished reading the Heather Lewis novel “Notice” after Myke said it was what he was reading recently. Overall, I thought it was an interesting book with quite a few standout scenes, even if it drags plot-wise towards the middle.
Below are my full thoughts:
The introduction by Melissa Febos is a solid read before getting into the novel itself. The only flaw here is that she does give too much of a synopsis of what’s going to happen in the story, so if spoilers bother you I would recommend reading the intro after you’ve finished the novel.
What was most important in the introduction is the backstory about Lewis, which explains that the author tried to get “Notice” published as her second novel, and that it was repeatedly rejected by publishers when she was alive. Lewis wound up taking some of the same ideas and repackaging it for a different novel she called “The Second Suspect,” but that book wasn’t well-received by critics. Eventually, after many years of being sober, Lewis relapsed and had a mental breakdown. She committed suicide at age 40.
Based on what people know of her, Lewis lived a hard life filled with abuse and mistreatment from both men and women, including her parents, and a lot of her experiences were channeled into her fiction. I kept all that in the back of my mind while I was reading “Notice.”
On the very first page of the novel, the narrator writes about being a young prostitute. There are a lot of novels out there that feature sex work, but this one stood out to me because of the intentionally detached matter-of-fact writing style. Everything is stated clearly, which helps the narrator immediately establish herself as a credible witness to her own life. At times it comes off as journaling with flair. Below are passages early in the novel:

1: “I’d gotten my money already, outside the car. Not much left to do now but do him, so I put my hand in his lap. Got him the rest of the way there, then unzipped him. Touched him some before I put my head down. It was fine really, was no big deal. He took maybe four minutes, and when he came I swallowed because neither of us had planned any place else to put it. Besides he’d been decent so it seemed wrong to leave him a mess to clean up.”
2: “Always try and convince them you like it, or them, whichever seems more important.”
3: “When we did go up the stairs he stopped at the landing, began pointing out pictures of his children. One daughter in particular he said I reminded him of, and I thought, At least for now you’re doing to me what you want to be doing to her. At least she’s off at some school like the rest of them.”
4: “The wife touched my cheek, still awkward and shaky like she was trying to find the right way to go about it. When her fingers got to my neck I found myself borrowing her shivers. Found myself trembling all over and so already I knew this was not a good thing to pursue. That it would make me feel something, which naturally is about the last thing you want.”
5: “I sat there waiting because I knew he liked giving instructions. I hadn’t worn any underwear this time because, let’s just say, I learned fast. He’d reached over to me in the car, smiling when he’d discovered this. It was the sort of thing I thought might get me more cash. It might with someone like him who liked you paying attention.”

It’s not a very long book at all (240ish pages) and the chapters read fairly quickly. As I said above I do think the story drags a bit in the middle unfortunately and I can see some people not loving the ending, but taking it for what it is the book was an interesting change of pace for what I'd been reading lately.
S/O to Myke for mentioning this book because I’d never heard of this author. It’s a shame that Lewis isn’t alive to see “Notice” get republished, but I'm glad it’s out there now and I suspect it will find the right audience.

FAIR WARNING THIS WILL BE A WALL OF TEXT
Intro: In a series of reviews that will begin (or return) here; we are going to try and take a critical look at the Chuck series, especially the unfolding of the story as scene through the teleplay. In this case we are assuming multiple things about a potential watcher:

• The watcher is new to the series and does not know about future episodes, but there is an expectation any previous episodes have been watched
  
• I will try not to point information out that becomes important for later episodes, though there may be times it's important because of how episodes are filmed and how episodes string together, I will however try and hide these behind a spoiler tag. I say this as a person who has watched Chuck dozens of times, so if I inadvertently spoiler, sorry.
  
• I will do my best to point out interesting references that are hidden within the Chuck universe, but not at the expense of extended expositions unless in-depth analysis is necessary as it relates to the scene.
  

What is this all for: This started as a project to improve my critical reviewing skills for a hobby of movie script writing and analysis. Chuck happens to have published 3 original scripts and all the text of every episode has been published to a searchable database. This affords an opportunity to break from my movie writing woes and infinite revisions to just have fun enjoying Chuck and trying to deepen my understanding of the intersection of script writing with filmography and visual editing. Having said this, it should be known I have no affiliation to the show, no additional insider knowledge, and I do not write scripts for a living. So, consequently, feel free to ignore everything I say :). I do hope, however, we can go on this journey together and appreciate the excellence that is a love story called Chuck.
So, don't freak out, and lets get started.
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Chuck 01x04 (Chuck vs the Wookiee): TEASER - We open with the gang playing "Know Ya!", which isn't actually a real board game, but based on the game Paddles. It's amazing that Morgan can't stand Ellie/Awesome being in love/winning, but marches triumphantly whenever he gets a question correct. I also like we see, in frame, Chuck watching Sarah pick off olives; he's beginning to notice things just like a real spy. The deep sadness and yet storied confliction on Chuck's face when he discovers Peaches 1 and Peaches 2 was great.
For those who don't know about dogs:

• A cocker spaniel is typically smaller; by ~5inches and up to 30lbs lighter than a springer spaniel.
• Springer spaniels also have shorter fur across their bodies, with feathered hair under their chests and legs.
• Only a cocker spaniel will be solid colored
• Springer spaniels have longer muzzles, while cockers have fluffier ears.

I find it very interesting how Sarah has "spidey sense" about potentially being watched. At no point previously did either Sarah nor Casey display this trait and I'm not totally sure how an open window was enough to do this; I wonder if Sarah's comfort being around Chuck's family is causing her to develop a "feeling of being watched" as she is comfortable with the Bartowski's? For those who missed it, Sarah talks about having a sister I think at the time this was just a throw-away line to protect her cover, but in season 5 Sarah does actually have a little sister if you count the little girl she rescues One last thing about Sarah here, when Bryce is being discussed, I really like how it was played where she acts quiet and shocked, but not saying anything. The facial expressions of Yvonne here are really special and you can tell Sarah lives a life of secrets. This is carried outside when Chuck asks Sarah about her relationship with Bryce. She is totally looking down and to the right, a classic indication of an emotional response searching for rationalization (ie. she is clearly lying)
As they end the game and exit to the courtyard, there teleplay of Chuck does something I've been wanting to see forever; they switch perspective to keep both characters in camera and follow them around from a 3rd perspective. We know this is supposed to indicate they are being watched, but I really enjoy getting to see them together reacting and talking instead of the constant close-ups and cuts. Normally Chuck will be shot with something between a medium close up (MCU) and Medium Shot (MS) to emphasize their characters and highlight their faces and expressions. This works really well because Chuck's cameras are typically either shoulder level or hip level based on the operators moving through their space. In many more modern TV shows, the technology of boom cranes and gyroscopic gimbals allows for content to be show from ground level to overhead giving directors the opportunity to tell their story through a variety of shifting profiles. If Chuck were shot today, we would see everything from full body shots all the way to extreme closeups without the need for continual jump-cuts and re-shoots because the technology is there. At least for this episode, it's nice to see the director explore more hip/knee level motion and more cowboy framed shots when having a distant observer perspective. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/types-of-camera-shots-sizes-in-film/ does a fantastic breakdown of all the different shot type and camera perspectives for you want to read more!
As we transition into Sarah's hotel room, did anyone pick up on how NICE this is? She has double sinks, a king bed, a sitting mirror, free standing tub, and a great view. I doubt any agency in the "real world" would ever spring for something like this for multiple years for one of their agents, it's fancy! Enter Carina, tell me, who saw Sarah fight with a soap sock and think of iCarly and the famous "butter sock". Also during this fight, why is Sarah wearing a golden bikini? I know she is about to get into the shower, but what plausible reason is there for her to a) wear a bikini at all and b) it to be a bright golden yellow?? If you slow this fight scene way down, you will notice Yvonne's strikes actually come close to hitting Mimi as she has had a lot of training, whereas Mimi's strikes are miles from Yvonne and she just over-acts their impact. The most noticeable is the kick into her table, Sarah goes flying back, but we can tell from the angle, Carina missed her by a good 2 ft. This was just some sloppy editing and not getting the camera into position. I give it a pass because you have probably 3 camera operators wearing stabilized camera rigs trying to rotate around a room with 2 girls fighting and they just missed the angle by like 2 feet. I did really like at the end of the fight Carina had the option to go for the gun but instead went for the fish. If you didn't know they were not enemies before, this should have been a big clue! Carina calls Sarah's life in LA boring #1
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ACT I
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Carina aka: Maria Elena Argalberdi was born Jun 16, 1978 in Alberdi Argentina with a Buenos Aires passport. Maria Elena is actually the name of a famous song in Mexico and eventually had a movie. This Chuck learns on Flash #1 and is the precursor to meeting the general for the first time. I know I've mentioned this before, but to reiterate; the pictures in Casey's apartment are all wrong; he has photos of Chuck and Morgan that don't happen until season 5 (lost footage) he has a map of Echo Park and Malibu already on display, and he has tactical information for each member of the Buy More (which he has no reason for at this time). It is interesting they talk about an opium cartel in Afghanistan as Afghanistan is known for it's huge poppy fields for heroin drug money.
The NADAN-I-NOOR diamond:

• The Nadan-I-Noor diamond has never been known to be bought or sold and ha only changed owners as a result of theft, conquest, or endowment
• It's listed as having 57 facets + 16 facets on girdle = 73. A facet is comparable with the brilliance of a diamond and is really the flat surfaces of a gemstone arranged in a geometrical pattern. In this case it helps characterize the refraction of light through the diamond interior. The girdle i the outer edge of a diamond surface, having 16 faces is quite large, as the girdle is the largest section of a gem, but also the thinnest when viewed from the side. In this case, having 73 facets puts the Nadan-I-Noor in either the Princess-Cut Diamond or Radiant Cut Diamond category, which are also the most expensive as they have the most possible facets.
• having 4-fold, mirror-image symmetry refers to how the light reflects internally to the diamond and indicates there are no impurities within the crystalline structure.
• interestingly a purity rating is not given, i would expect something like a F or IF (flawless/internally flawless) for a diamond described like this, but one isn't provided.
• the angles of incidence just describe the best way for light to enterefract from the diamond, these numbers are fake, but the metric is real
• there is a lot of sanscript written around the diamond markings, I can't figure out what if anything it means it looks like repeated nonsense
• could be a nod to the Koh-i-noor or "mountain of light" diamond, although this one in Persian is the "fool of light".

We open back to see Carina and Sarah looking at classified files within the restaurant. THIS IS AGAINST THE LAW, you do not look at classified files out in the open and especially not where there are clearly other customers around. Venturing into the BuyMore, there is a monster truck rally on the TV's showing grave digger and reaper, two famous trucks from this time period. Morgan wants to spread his wings and be the fourth wheel to the perpetual 3 wheel party and Sarah, ever the schemer, literally glows when she thinks of the plan to have Carina go on a date with Morgan. I THINK this was just to help maintain their cover, but also maybe Sarah is just needling Carina? If you look in the back of the store when Chuck is talking to Sarah and Carina, there is a really cool Nerd Herd poster that says "Bringing peace to your computer emergency". "if a yawn could yawn" is Carina calling Sarah's job boring #2. One thing I really like with the double data is the way the camera jumps between the couples: boy/girl, boy/boy, girl/girl. I think they way they try and keep private conversations via screen time is a really nice, typical, teleplay trick that really works well here. In a "real" environment, everyone could hear everything, but by splitting the camera focus or playing with perspective, the viewer clearly knows "this is a conversation between girls the boys don't hear it". We see Chuck noticing Sarah picking off olives #2 while they watch a movie about penguins: who mate for life, present their love in the form of rocks, and are pack animals. In Chuck's bedroom as he talks to Morgan, Chuck has a box of King Edward Invincible underneath bongos; for those who don't know this is a famous box for mild tobacco cigars. So I wonder what Chuck is up to in his free time :P.
On the Nerd Herd call with Carina, she opens a bottle of wine with a butter knife. This is actually a pretty famous thing that is done all over the world with everything from a key to a saber. In fact they make a specially type of knife with an extra wide blade for this it Italy. I do want to ask the question; is Carina dressed in red lingerie (Chuck's favorite color she stole from Sarah) really necessary for this scene? I know that Carina is all about improvising and she often uses her sexuality to progress her cause (Casey), but I think we could have gotten away with just the top. I can certainly see the rationalization for going this far, but I think as an artistic choice it wasn't necessary. What IS necessary however is to talk about how Chuck's world implodes when Carina tells him about Sarah and Bryce. Also the perfect act transition ending right at Chuck's jaw dropping and the work boyfriend!
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ACT II
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I'll say it again, the back an forth with Chuck and Sarah should have been a medium close up, shoulder level straight on shot instead of the constant cuts. Seeing their reaction in real time would have been easier and it would have allowed the Weinerlicious to be maybe 15 ft smaller to not need so many cameramen rotating. "Unless talking to your boyfriend is a matter of national security, the ketchup bottles won't refill themselves". Why yes it IS a mater of national security for Sarah to talk to Chuck... also if any one of us stood up to our boss like Sarah did, I'm pretty sure we'd be fired on the spot!
Malibu is ~2hours for Echo Park with standard LA traffic. Seriously, how do girls in high heels walk down stairs; we see Carina and Sarah walking sideways so there is enough space on each step to fit their shoes. Girls, how do you do that and not fall especially with narrow staircases and 3-6inch heels! Inside the room with the stone there is a bust of Cesare, archenemies, da vinci, and biblical David. There is also some famous paintings the best of which is Vemieer's "young girl with a pearl earring" which is rather appropriate considering it's meaning. There is also a Van Gogh of man in a wheat field and a Monet in one shot too. If ANY of these paintings were real instead of reproductions, they would be worth millions, in fact the young girl with a pearl is estimated at 40million, which is 1.5x the sell value of the Nadan-I-Noor! If we take a look at the engineering drawing of Flash #2 on the pedestal, we would see this design creates a closed circuit around the tongs the diamond rests on; which might explain it's red hue. If a person were to touch the diamond, it would close the circuit on their body allowing the 4000volts to travel through their heart. A person can die with ~20volts, though it's usually more like 50 in most occurrences. 4000volts is enough to kill a herd of elephants and completely overkill for a person. Also the amount of power that would take is more than the city of Malibu... this is to say the trap is real, the numbers are complete nonsense; thinking lightning! Nice shot by Sarah with the plate (there are some great bloopers on this too where she misses badly)! A remote controlled jet ski... i'm not even going to calculate the nonsense for this; it's just total nonsense. Almost as much nonsense as Casey using his phone to track Carina's call. That would take minutes, even with today's technology to back trace like that and way more power than just pushing a button on a razer flip-phone from the 90's!
back at the house, Chuck i playing halo with the legendary skulls as his weapon; this is nice because in the BuyMore at the end of the episode there are dudes dressed as master chief! I really like the changing perspective here with Chuck and Morgan. Chuck's reactions remain in focus while Morgan tells a story behind him, then it switches as Chuck starts to move around until bringing both into focus for the final line "we still have each other and that's really sad". The side cut to Sarah picking locks to the hotel door is classic early 2000's TV and i'm all for it, even if it is super cheezy. BTW as someone who used to lock pick in college, that's .... not how that works, but good try. We get our Flash #3 on the diamond in Morgan's back nuclear explosions. I wonder if the refractive capability of a diamond this pure is enough to focus laser to induce fission or if the value of selling the diamond is enough to buy nuclear material on the black market? Either way, we end the act with... the man with the golden gun!
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ACT III
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Chuck uses Sarah's plate move against Carina, nice inter-episode call back; he's clearly watching/learning, but his aim is terrible. This was actually clever as Sarah has perfect aim for she is a professional, while Chuck is still definitely a civilian and has no aptitude for fighting. I really like both these types of simple call backs but also how seemingly throw-away lines/actions help tell the broad story of the show. Chuck talking to Carina also shows Chuck has this weird, innate aptitude to get people to re-evaluate themselves and grow internally. You can watch Carina "grow in real-time. When we get to the hotel and Carina opens her trunk first there are a few glocks, a couple rugers, and a 1911; then she switches to blades and we see some folders, some strait blades, an illegal gravity blade (still illegal today), and a kbar... nice selection! Carina, always the flirt, gives Chuck some very insightful works about the nature of being a spy, but also maybe some way to get through to Sarah.
Inside the hotel we see Carina and Sarah speaking; Carina is speaking Swedish, while Sarah replies in Polish. "Om jag slänger nycklarna till dig, kommer du tappa dem då?" which is Swedish for "If I throw you the keys, will you drop them?" Sarah answered in Polish: "Tylko jak rzucisz jak twoja mamusia", which means "Only if you throw it like your mommy". This is just great!
I want to talk about how fast Chuck managed to find an address for DC, print a label, open a box, put the label on, and get the diamond there all before the door gets broken. Somehow on screen time this is like 10seconds, but in real life this would have to be like 3minutes minimum? Either that door is remarkably strong or... TV magic??
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ACT IV
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Even with all the flirting, as we say goodbye to Carina >! for now !< she is still joking with Casey and every the professional. I like how they show when it's "game time" it's all about the job, but spys can be people too! Carina still calls Sarah's life boring #3 (the common trifecta of episode repeats).
Sarah's face when Chuck brings the pizza with no olives is the reason I think Yvonne makes the perfect Sarah. She exudes the hidden beauty needed and has the acting to so such emotion for Chuck being sweet. The whole scene with Chuck and Sarah asking questions, then Chuck backing off, then Sarah acting stoic like she WANTS to open up but doesn't know if she can really trust Chuck, is ready to move on from Bryce, and should for the nature of her job. This was probably the most well acted 20seconds of the entire episode. Finally, we hear Sarah's middle name is Lisa. Now we never officially know if Chuck hears this or not both due to camera focus and distance, it's never officially confirmed in the entire show. When the intersect is updated in season 4 we see Sarah's picture and it lists Lisa as a middle name, so we assume it's official, but it's never confirmed at any point. Finally, I really like how they end the episode with Sarah closing her eyes as the fade to black.
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Few notes: There are 5 official songs in this episode:

• "Yea Yeah" by Matt and Kim - when the gang is playing board games during group date night. This song is about not worrying about the things you cannot change. Little things that build up and bum you out that you need to just let go.
• "Wild Girl" Matt Pond PA - Chuck and Morgan discussing their relationship problems. This song is about overcoming past struggles and finding hope in the present and future. Describing a sense of resilience and optimism
• "weird science" by does it offend you - Chuck and Carina talk at Peyman' Malibu Compound. This is a remind to break free and embrace individuality and live on your own terms. Be unapologetically ourselves.
• Shy by Mathew Dear - the double date
• "Fall into place" the apartment - the team say's goodby to Carina. Deals with growing up, taking (or not taking) chances. finding oneself in the unpredictability of life. I have to say, we don't actually hear the lyrics to any of these songs during the episode just the melody, but I don't really appreciate the music choices here. I feel like there were better options at key points, so that's a miss from me.
  
• On the DVD for Season One the word Wookiee is spelled incorrectly, leaving off the last E.
  
• "It used to be titled "Chuck Versus the Speedo" because the main bad guy in this show is this dude who wears a Speedo all the time. Then when the casting guy realized he had a good amount -- and by good, I mean healthy, a healthy amount of body hair -- they thought, why not call it "Chuck vs. the Wookiee". So it's this guy who's got this diamond, and we're trying to heist the diamond and all hell breaks loose." ―Zachary Levi quoted by Access Hollywood discussing this episode's title
  

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I think this was a great episode and really showcased what they can do when additional cast members join the team and when they are not afraid to play with perspective. Mimi as Carina is a great addition to the ensemble and I wish we saw her more, but every time she drops in, it's always a wild episode and it's fantastic. Watching Chuck learn about Sarah and seeing Sarah start to open up is a good way forward and heck Casey had some of the best humor in the episode. Overall, it was fast paced, had some nice character development, as funny in the best way, and moved the main theme along, 8/10.

DAY: MAY 31 2024
5-31-2024

RESEARCH SUGGESTS LEADERS’ SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS ARE TAKEN JUST AS SERIOUSLY AS FORMAL STATEMENTS

Over 180 world leaders maintain social media accounts, and some of them issue policy warnings to rivals and the public on these platforms rather than relying on traditional government statements. How seriously do people take such social media postings? A new study suggests the general public and policymakers alike take leaders’ social media posts just as seriously as they take formal government statements. The research, by MIT political scientists, deploys novel surveys of both the public and experienced foreign policy specialists. “What we find, which is really surprising, across both
5-31-2024

SCALE OF ONLINE HARM TO CHILDREN REVEALED IN GLOBAL STUDY

More than 300 million children a year are victims of online sexual exploitation and abuse, research indicates. Pupils in every classroom, in every school, in every country are victims of this hidden pandemic, according to researchers who have conducted the first global estimate of the scale of the crisis. The statistics, from the Childlight Global Child Safety Institute at the University of Edinburgh, amount to a clear and present danger to the world’s children, according to the crime agency Interpol. Online risks One in eight of the world’s children, about
5-31-2024

PRONATALISM IS THE LATEST SILICON VALLEY TREND. WHAT IS IT—AND WHY IS IT DISTURBING?

For Malcolm and Simone Collins, declining birth rates across many developed countries are an existential threat. The solution is to have “tons of kids,” and to use a hyperrational, data-driven approach to guide everything from genetic selection to baby names and day-to-day parenting. They don’t heat their Pennsylvania home in winter, because heating is a “pointless indulgence.” Their children wear iPads around their necks. And a Guardian journalist witnessed Malcolm strike their two-year-old across the face for misbehavior, a parenting style they apparently developed based on watching “tigers
5-31-2024

HOW SCIENCE, MATH, AND TECH CAN PROPEL SWIMMERS TO NEW HEIGHTS

One hundred years ago, in the 1924 Paris Olympics, American Johnny Weissmuller won the men’s 100m freestyle with a time of 59 seconds. Nearly 100 years later, in the most recent Olympics, the delayed 2020 Games in Tokyo, Caeleb Dressel took home the same event with a time that was 12 seconds faster than Weissmuller’s. Swimming times across the board have become much faster over the past century, a result of several factors, including innovations
5-31-2024

BANNING SEX CRIME OFFENDERS FROM CHANGING THEIR NAMES DOESN’T MAKE US SAFER

The government of British Columbia recently introduced a bill to ban people convicted of serious offenses from legally changing their name. The proposed amendment to the province’s Name Act would also prohibit those found not criminally responsible due to mental disorder from changing their name. The government announced the move after media reports that Allan Schoenborn legally changed his name to Ken Johnson. Schoenborn was found not criminally responsible for the deaths of his children in 2010 because of a delusional disorder, and was placed at a psychiatric hospital.
5-31-2024

SILICON VALLEY ISN’T THE START-UP UTOPIA WE THOUGHT, RESEARCH FINDS

Silicon Valley—considered the world’s hub of technology and innovation—can breed inequality and sameness among budding entrepreneurs, according to new research. Behind the multi-million-dollar deals and tales of start-up utopia, Silicon Valley’s “uneven” investment landscape is in fact a barrier to many budding businesses, says the study from the University of Stirling and Georg-August-University Göttingen. But the researchers suggest other countries could still learn from the more discerning entrepreneurial ecosystem that bred giants such as Apple and Google, to be more selective in backing start-ups. While it is not uncommon for
5-31-2024

I WANT TO KEEP MY CHILD SAFE FROM ABUSE—BUT RESEARCH TELLS ME I’M DOING IT WRONG

Child sexual abuse is uncomfortable to think about, much less talk about. The idea of an adult engaging in sexual behaviors with a child feels sickening. It’s easiest to believe that it rarely happens, and when it does, that it’s only to children whose parents aren’t protecting them. This belief stayed with me during my early days as a parent. I kept an eye out for creepy men at the playground and was skeptical of men who worked with young children, such as teachers and coaches. When my kids were
5-31-2024

OVER 300 MILLION YOUNG PEOPLE HAVE EXPERIENCED ONLINE SEXUAL ABUSE, EXPLOITATION, FINDS METASTUDY

It takes a lot to shock Kelvin Lay. My friend and colleague was responsible for setting up Africa’s first dedicated child exploitation and human trafficking units, and for many years he was a senior investigating officer for the Child Exploitation Online Protection Center at the UK’s National Crime Agency, specializing in extra territorial prosecutions on child exploitation across the globe. But what happened when he recently volunteered for a demonstration of cutting-edge identification software left him speechless. Within seconds of being fed with an image
5-31-2024

CYBERFLASHING IS A FORM OF GENDERED SEXUAL VIOLENCE THAT MUST BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY

Sexting—sending sexually suggestive or explicit messages and images—is now a widespread practice, and can be a healthy way to express and explore sexuality. However, there is a need to distinguish between consensual sexting and forms of sexual harassment like cyberflashing. Cyberflashing refers to the act of non-consensually sending sexual imagery (like nudes or “dick pics”) to another person. It is facilitated through communications technologies including text, AirDrop and social media applications like Snapchat and Tinder. Similar to flashing—when a person unexpectedly and deliberately “flashes” their genitals to others—that occurs in
5-31-2024

VIRTUAL TRAINING MAY BE AN EFFECTIVE, COST-EFFICIENT OPTION FOR CHILD EDUCATORS

Teachers and other child educators can benefit from regular professional development, but in-person training can be expensive. New research found that virtual training can be a budget-friendly alternative—and especially effective for certain groups of educators. The study—a collaboration between researchers at Penn State and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and published in the International Journal of Professional Development, Learners and Learning—found that educators who took a virtual training reported feeling more confident in their abilities to implement practices shown to support positive youth development. In particular, after-school providers who did not
5-31-2024

HUMBLE LEADERS BOOST EMPLOYEES’ WORKPLACE STATUS AND LEADERSHIP POTENTIAL, FINDS STUDY

There are many different types of workplace leaders, from those who prioritize the needs of team members and the organization above their own, to authentic leaders who foster openness, trust and transparency. A recent study by the University of South Australia published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior has highlighted the significant benefits of humble leadership in the workplace. According to the study by UniSA’s Dr. Xiao Lin, humble leadership can effectively elevate the workplace status of employees by boosting their sense of respect and prominence. It also leads to
5-31-2024

WHY ARE GROCERY BILLS SO HIGH? A NEW STUDY LOOKS AT THE SCIENCE BEHIND FOOD PRICE REPORTING

Rising food costs are squeezing Canadians around the country. Nearly everyone is feeling the pinch, and it’s not just an inconvenience—high food prices are a major threat to food security for many Canadians. Understanding why food prices are so high and why they are changing is critical to the well-being of our society. Unfortunately, consensus on why food price are so high is in short supply. Explanations given in reports like Canada’s Food Price Report and the news media range widely, from the war in Ukraine to supply chain issues
5-31-2024

WILL GENERATIVE AI CHANGE THE WAY UNIVERSITIES COMMUNICATE?

Is artificial intelligence an unprecedented opportunity, or will it rob everyone of jobs and creativity? As we debate on social media (and perhaps use ChatGPT almost daily), generative AIs have also entered the arena of university communication. These tools—based on large language models that were optimized for interactive communication—can indeed support, expand, and innovate university communication offerings. Justus Henke has analyzed the situation of German realities about six months after the launch of ChatGPT 3. “The research was conducted about a year ago when enthusiasm was high, but it was
5-31-2024

STUDY SHOWS RELATIVELY LOW NUMBER OF SUPERSPREADERS RESPONSIBLE FOR LARGE PORTION OF MISINFORMATION ON TWITTER

Classification of superspreader accounts. A large portion (55.1%) of accounts are no longer active. For each class annotated with political affiliations, colors indicate the ideological split. The last group aggregates all accounts with political affiliations. Credit: PLOS ONE (2024). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0302201 A small team of social media analysts at Indiana University has found that a major portion of tweets spreading disinformation are sent by a surprisingly small percentage of a given userbase. In their study, published in PLOS ONE, the group conducted a review of 2,397,388 tweets posted on Twitter
5-31-2024

HOW LIFE’S BIG MOMENTS CAN CHALLENGE STARTUPS

Life-changing events like the birth of a child, the purchase of a new home, or a lottery win could threaten the survival of a new business venture, the positive family events had a comparatively greater influence, albeit negatively, on the survival of a new venture, compared with
5-31-2024

RUDE AT WORK? FEELING GUILTY CAN MAKE YOU A BETTER, KINDER WORKER

We’ve all done it. A bad night’s sleep or a tough commute made us cranky, and we lashed out at a coworker who did nothing wrong. What can we do to make up for it? According to a new study published in the Journal of Business Ethics, embracing our guilty feelings can help us make up for our bad behavior by encouraging us to act more politely and work harder the next day. “We found that anyone can be rude at work, because anyone can
5-31-2024

RESEARCHERS INTRODUCE A PLANETARY INCLUSION SCALE TO FOSTER BROADER ETHICAL THINKING

Social inclusion and having a sense of belonging with other people are key elements of a good life. However, the fate of humanity is a challenge that extends beyond our social reality. Experiences of belonging and inclusion, understood in a broader sense than before, may be crucial for a sustainable future. In an article published in the International Journal of Social Pedagogy, a team of researchers propose a new planetary inclusion scale that structures our planetary relationship three-dimensionally based on temporal, spatial and ethical orientation. The temporal element relates to
5-31-2024

‘LEAN IN’ MESSAGES CAN LOWER WOMEN’S MOTIVATION TO PROTEST GENDER INEQUALITY

Women in leadership are often told to “Lean In,” designed to be motivational messaging demonstrating that they are more confident, strategic and resilient to setback. However, new research indicates that such “lean in” messaging can hinder women’s motivation to protest gender equality. Popularized in a book by American technology executive Sherly Sandberg, the “Lean In” solution to gender inequality advises women that demonstrating personal resilience and perseverance in the face of setbacks is key to career advancement. Now, a new study led by the University of Exeter, Bath Spa University
5-31-2024

ALGORITHMS COULD HELP IMPROVE JUDICIAL DECISIONS

A new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics finds that replacing certain judicial decision-making functions with algorithms could improve outcomes for defendants by eliminating some of the systemic biases of judges. Decision makers make consequential choices based on predictions of unknown outcomes. Judges, in particular, make decisions about whether to grant bail to defendants or how to sentence those convicted. Companies now use machine learning based models increasingly in high-stakes decisions. There are various assumptions about human behavior underlying the deployment of such learning models that play out in
5-31-2024

DIGITAL CAMPAIGNING IS A HUGE PART OF ELECTIONS NOW—BUT GOING VIRAL ISN’T EVERYTHING

The election has commenced and the race is on—to amass as many likes, shares and comments as possible. Digital campaigning, particularly through social media, is now a key part of political candidates’ communication toolkit. In fact, every general election campaign since 1997 has at some point been lauded as the first to make effective use of digital campaigning. But it was in 2015 that David Cameron’s campaign first made strategic use of social media to drive an election victory. As political reporter Tim Ross outlines in his excellent book, Why
5-31-2024

WHY ARE ORGANIZATIONAL COVER-UPS SO COMMON?

The TV dramatization of the UK Horizon Post Office scandal evoked outrage and disbelief. However, as another example of dysfunctional organizational behavior, it was expected rather than exceptional. The Post Office saga joins a long list of cover-ups or scandals that includes Hillsborough, Enron, Grenfell, the infected blood scandal, the Tuam babies scandal in the Republic of Ireland, Boeing 737 Max and Nasa (Columbia space shuttle). They represent what happens when there is a move within organizations and institutions to cover up the causes of
5-31-2024

AMONG GEN Z AUSTRALIANS, 38% IDENTIFY AS SPIRITUAL AND HALF BELIEVE IN KARMA. WHY IS SPIRITUALITY SO POPULAR?

Spirituality is increasingly popular with young Australians: recent research shows 38% of Gen Z Australians identify as spiritual. It also reports 50% of them believe in karma, 29% in reincarnation and 20% in astrology. When it comes to activities equated with spirituality, 28% of Gen Z Australians practice meditation and 22% practice yoga. In Australia, spirituality is strongly, enduringly central to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and culturally and religiously diverse communities. Yet until recently, spirituality has received far less attention than religion. Spirituality may be
5-31-2024

COMPANIES CAN IMPROVE THE SUSTAINABILITY OF THEIR PRODUCTS IN THE EARLIEST PRODUCT-DESIGN STAGES

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Lithuanian and Italian universities propose a tool that allows companies to assess the circularity of their future products. The self-assessment tool emphasizes the co-creation of circular design in the early (creative) stages of product development, encouraging entrepreneurs and designers to think more systematically and collaborate better by integrating related stakeholders into the product development process. The study is published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. “The majority of existing practical tools (systems of indicators) are aimed at measuring the environmental impact of products already
5-31-2024

RESEARCH EXAMINES HOW RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION AFFECTS A STATE’S COLLEGE ENROLLMENT

New research has revealed up to a 9% increase in college first-year enrollments in US states that have legalized recreational marijuana compared with states without such legalization. The study, which is published in Economic Inquiry, found that the increase was from out-of-state enrollments, with early adopter states and public non-research institutions experiencing the most pronounced increases. Recreational marijuana legalization did not negatively impact degree completion or graduation rate, and it did not affect college prices, quality, or in?state enrollment. The findings suggest that some students perceive recreational marijuana legalization as
5-31-2024

RESEARCH EXAMINES HOW RECREATIONAL MARIJUANA LEGALIZATION AFFECTS A STATE’S COLLEGE ENROLLMENT

New research has revealed up to a 9% increase in college first-year enrollments in US states that have legalized recreational marijuana compared with states without such legalization. The study, which is published in Economic Inquiry, found that the increase was from out-of-state enrollments, with early adopter states and public non-research institutions experiencing the most pronounced increases. Recreational marijuana legalization did not negatively impact degree completion or graduation rate, and it did not affect college prices, quality, or in?state enrollment. The findings suggest that some students perceive recreational marijuana legalization as
5-31-2024

HOW THE ‘MODEL MINORITY’ MYTH HARMS ASIAN AMERICANS

May is Asian and Pacific American Heritage Month, a time when Americans celebrate the profound contributions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders—a group that is commonly abbreviated as AAPI—to U.S. society. It’s also a time to acknowledge the complexity of AAPI experience. And as a professor who studies equity and inclusion in business, I think the focus on AAPI communities this month provides an excellent occasion to push back against a stereotype that has long misrepresented and marginalized a diverse range of people: the myth of the “model minority.” The
5-31-2024

WONDERING HOW TO TEACH YOUR KIDS ABOUT CONSENT? HERE’S AN AGE-BASED GUIDE TO GET YOU STARTED

The Australian government’s new campaign Consent Can’t Wait challenges us all to improve our understanding of consent. It asks a series of questions to illustrate this issue is more complex than simplistic “no means no” messaging. The campaign invites viewers to consider the nuances of consent, so we can raise these important issues with children and young people in our lives. But what is a good age to start talking about consent? How do parents tackle such conversations when this information probably wasn’t readily discussed in our own upbringing? How
5-31-2024

A PRODUCT OF NATURE OR NURTURE?

The concept of cultural entrepreneurship has many facets. It encompasses both the cultural and social impact of entrepreneurial training, and the environmental factors that influence its development. Some societies, such as the U.S., have a strong entrepreneurial culture. This means that certain characteristics are celebrated and encouraged, such as the ability of individuals to assume risks, patience when confronting challenges, and innovative problem solving, especially in uncertain situations. However, not all countries have such an entrepreneurial culture. Entrepreneurship struggles to take off in Europe In general, entrepreneurship can drive economic
5-31-2024

STUDY BRIDGES ANIMAL BEHAVIOR RESEARCH AND COMPUTER CODING TO ENGAGE CHILDREN IN STEM

A graphic depicting a student coding. Credit: Carnegie Mellon University Teachers today face a bit of a conundrum, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Their goal is to prepare young students to enter a rapidly changing world. Even basic jobs require technical proficiency, which requires computational and analytical skills. To address this need, many educators are pushing to fold these important STEM skills into elementary curriculum. Here’s the problem. Young students can lose interest and even develop an aversion
5-31-2024

STUDY SHOWS VR CAN HELP TEACHERS BETTER DISTRIBUTE THEIR GAZE

On the left, a bird’s-eye view of the virtual classroom; on the right, screenshots of each of the four gaze-visualization conditions. Teachers need to know their material, but they must also keep their students engaged and interested. Part of that involves making eye contact with their students—all of them. A multidisciplinary team of researchers tested several methods of data visualization in an immersive virtual reality (VR) classroom, to give teachers a way to gauge
5-31-2024

MARKETERS CAN MANAGE ‘FEATURE CREEP’ SO CONSUMERS FEEL LESS INTIMIDATED BY TOO MANY FEATURES IN A PRODUCT

Wifi-enabled washing machines. Voice-controlled microwaves. App-enabled TVs, vacuum cleaners, and even window blinds you can control from the comfort of your couch. Many of the technological features now included in everyday products are useful and accessible. But research has shown that having too many can overwhelm potential buyers, making them less likely to make a purchase. In recent research, Wayne Hoyer, marketing professor and James L. Bayless/William S. Farrish Fund Chair for Free Enterprise at Texas McCombs, digs into the phenomenon of “feature creep” and its impact on consumer sentiment.
5-31-2024

RESEARCHERS EXPLAIN SOCIAL MEDIA’S ROLE IN RAPIDLY SHIFTING SOCIAL NORMS ON GENDER AND SEXUALITY

A new paper summarizing decades of research demonstrates how social media has supported an explosion of diversity in gender and sexuality in America during the 21st century, and also how these technologies have equally enabled a cultural backlash. The paper’s authors, UC Santa Cruz Psychology Department faculty members Phil Hammack and Adriana Manago, identified five main narratives about gender and sexuality that they believe emerged through social media as people have strived to be “authentic” on these platforms. The findings, along with resulting recommendations for psychology researchers and practitioners, were
5-31-2024

KEY FACTORS IN TRAINING ASSESSORS FOR ENHANCED PERFORMANCE RATINGS

New research is examining how organizations can improve their training programs by customizing frame-of-reference training to emphasize identifying negative behaviors critical to their goals. While assessors naturally identify positive behaviors, C. Allen Gorman, Ph.D., associate professor in UAB’s Department of Management, Information Systems and Quantitative Methods, says targeted training helps them recognize harmful actions that can hinder organizational objectives. Involving assessors in defining important performance dimensions and examples of behaviors, both good and
5-31-2024

STUDIES CHALLENGE WIDELY HELD BELIEFS ON APPLICANT DIVERSITY AND WOMEN IN THE WORKPLACE

Justin Frake is interested in cause-and-effect relationships in real-world data and the hidden dynamics that shape workplace behavior and equality—or inequality, as the case might be. His curiosity has led to research that challenges some popular beliefs as well as published studies related to women in the workforce. One study shows that firms promoting flatter hierarchies inadvertently discourage female applicants and another study counters several recent studies that claim women CEOs negatively impact career outcomes of other women. Both are published in the Strategic Management Journal. The assistant professor of
5-31-2024

CHALLENGING LEWIN’S MOTIVATIONAL CONFLICTS THEORY

A recent series of experiments challenges the longstanding theory of motivational conflict resolution introduced by Kurt Lewin. According to Lewin, conflicts between two undesirable outcomes (avoidance–avoidance conflicts) are typically harder to resolve than those between two desirable ones (approach–approach conflicts). Lewin posited that avoidance–avoidance conflicts, where individuals must choose between two undesirable outcomes, are typically more challenging to resolve compared to approach–approach conflicts, which involve choosing between two desirable options.
5-31-2024

MEN WITH ‘TOXIC MASCULINITY’ ARE MORE LIKELY TO MAKE SEXUAL ADVANCES WITHOUT CONSENT, STUDY FINDS

No means no when it comes to sex. But what happens when a woman makes a more passive response to a sexual advance? According to new research from Binghamton University, men differ in how they interpret these types of responses, and men who display hostile masculinity, known commonly as “toxic masculinity,” tend to act on them regardless of whether or not they think it’s consensual. A team of researchers, including Binghamton psychology professor Richard Mattson and graduate student Michael Shaw asked men between the ages of 18–25 to respond to
5-31-2024

WHY WE DEHUMANIZE OUR POLITICAL OPPONENTS

Some of human history’s greatest atrocities—genocide, slavery, ethnic cleanings—are rooted in our ability to dehumanize people from other social, political, or cultural groups. Whereas prior research has traced dehumanization to the belief that others think or feel less than we do, new research co-authored by Haas professor Sameer Srivastava shows that our tendency to dehumanize can also be influenced by how we think others view important facets of the world. The greater the difference between our perceptions of an outgroup’s worldview
5-31-2024

STUDY SUGGESTS CHILDREN ARE OFTEN EXPOSED TO PROBLEMATIC CLICK BAIT DURING YOUTUBE SEARCHES

When a child peruses YouTube, the content recommended to them is not always age appropriate, a new study suggests. Researchers mimicked search behaviors of children using popular search terms, such as memes, Minecraft and Fortnite, and captured video thumbnails recommended at the end of each video. Among the 2,880 thumbnails analyzed, many contained problematic click bait, such as violence or frightening images, according to the Michigan Medicine led research in JAMA Network Open. “Children spend a significant amount of time on free video sharing platforms that include user-generated content,” said
5-31-2024

STUDY FINDS WOMEN ARE VULNERABLE IN POST-WAR PEACE PROCESSES

Post-war peace processes are a dangerous period for women. Many are forced to live close to men who committed serious abuse during the war or are expected to testify in various types of truth commissions, which can be both retraumatizing and stigmatizing. These are the findings of a new study by peace researchers at Uppsala University, published in the journal PLOS ONE. “In short, peace projects can force women to live side by side with ex-combatants who committed atrocities during the war. This puts them at risk of further threat
5-31-2024

HOW EMBRACING THE CRINGE CAN HELP YOUR DATING LIFE

We can all agree that dating is hard. Getting to know people can feel vulnerable, but at the same time, exciting. We can also agree that feeling rejected can be one of the worst feelings, especially after we put ourselves out there. Dating can also expose us to a lot of cringey things, maybe even something we didn’t know we’d consider cringey. Think of cringe like something that makes you uncomfortable, or something about someone else that you don’t find attractive. Before dating, most of us consider what we’re looking
5-31-2024

PERSONAL CONNECTIONS AT WORK POSITIVELY IMPACT RETENTION AND MENTAL HEALTH, SAYS REPORT

New survey results from Wiley suggest people still feel connected at work despite the prevalence of hybrid and remote work environments and the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). According to the latest Wiley Workplace Intelligence report, “Human Connection: The Crucial Secret to Thriving in the Digital Age,” nearly 8 in 10 employees surveyed (78%) said they feel connected with their coworkers, and almost 7 in 10 (69%) said they also enjoy making connections with their colleagues. Around half even said they want to learn more about their coworkers by doing
5-31-2024

RESEARCHER DEVELOPS MODEL OF INFLUENCER IMPORTANCE WITHIN INSTAGRAM NETWORKS

A study has provided new insights into social media influencers, particularly focusing on those in the women’s fashion sector on the well-known image and video sharing platform Instagram. In a departure from the approach taken by earlier studies, Jens K. Perret of the International School of Management in Cologne, Germany, has used network statistics and centrality measures to establish a model of influencer importance within their network. Perret analyzed data from 255 influencers covering a four-year period. Influencers are loosely
5-31-2024

MOST PEOPLE TRUST ACCURATE SEARCH RESULTS WHEN THE STAKES ARE HIGH, STUDY FINDS

Rank (X-axis) does not affect the evaluation of trustworthiness (Y-axis, mean-centered) of accurate results. This lack of relationship is robust across experiments (columns) and for clicked results (top row, red) as well as non-clicked results (bottom row, blue). The trend lines represent the predicted change in trustworthiness ratings per unit decrease in rank fitted by the linear regression models. Credit: Scientific Reports (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-61645-8 Using experiments with COVID-19 related queries, Cornell sociology and information science researchers found that in a public health emergency, most people pick out and click
5-31-2024

MISLEADING COVID-19 HEADLINES FROM MAINSTREAM SOURCES DID MORE HARM ON FACEBOOK THAN FAKE NEWS, STUDY FINDS

Despite the greater potency of “fake news” on Facebook to discourage Americans from taking the COVID-19 vaccine, users’ greater exposure to unflagged, vaccine-skeptical content meant the latter had a much greater negative effect on vaccine uptake. Credit: Jennifer Allen, Duncan Watts, David G. Rand Since the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, fake news on social media has been widely blamed for low vaccine uptake in the United States—but research by MIT Sloan School of Management Ph.D. candidate Jennifer Allen and Professor David Rand finds that the blame lies
5-31-2024

CRITICAL DIALOGUE HELPS STRAIGHT MEN CONFRONT SEXIST, HOMOPHOBIC BELIEFS

Adult heterosexual men with sexist and homophobic views can potentially improve their attitudes toward gay men and women by engaging in critical dialogues that use illustrations as a springboard, according to a new University of Michigan study. The work is published in the journal Sexual and Gender Diversity in Social Services. The process by which people shift from a prejudicial stance to one of relative acceptance is a key innovation of the study. Guided by trained facilitators, critical dialogues reflect illustrations depicting different gender roles and sexual identities. The images
5-31-2024

RELIEVING A FEAR OF PUBLIC SPEAKING

If you dread public speaking you are not alone. It is a leading social phobia, one that can cause a state of anxiety that reduces otherwise articulate people to nervous incoherence. A strong fear of public speaking is known as glossophobia. Academic studies estimate it affects 20% of the population, but depending on the sample and methodology, the figure could be as high as 40%. As American writer and humourist Mark Twain said, “There are two types of speakers: Those who get nervous and those who are liars.” But help
5-31-2024

HOW SOME PRIVATE COMPANIES ARE MARKETING TECH AND AI SOLUTIONS

How do universities and colleges decide who to admit? Given the earnings advantage of a post-secondary degree both globally and in Canada, this is an important social mobility question. While the answer varies from one institution to the next, most focus on education criteria like exam scores and grades. However, Canada’s new intake cap on study permit applications puts increased pressure on Canadian institutions to also consider immigration criteria when admitting international undergraduate students. This is just the latest example of immigration’s growing influence on the societal roles of Canadian

TL;DR: Shooters have notoriously had a difficult time staying alive while under Nexon's banner.
Go ahead and spam your downvotes, but if you're someone that actually likes to engage in conversation, I urge you to read on.

Intro -- Personal

For starters, The Finals is my favorite FPS game to come out in the last 5 years. I've played since the second CBT and have loved just about every second of it. Prior to my time with The Finals, I was an Apex Legends nerd since release. The pro match hacking incident in Apex Legends is what pushed me over the edge; an edge that I was already barely hanging onto after 3+ years of awful decision-making, balancing, bugs, and tone-deaf MTX offerings. And going even further back 13-ish years (my time with League of Legends), I played Combat Arms for about 4 years and ran a very successful Guild.
Keep Combat Arms in mind for a little later.

The Final(s) Nail In The Coffin

HYENAS
At the time of the first The Finals trailer, HYENAS had been running in closed testing for about 8 months and was luke warm, to say the least. I actually find it very eerie how similar the HYENAS and The Finals were in terms of theming: heisters/contestants fighting for cash in arenas and needing to 'Cash Out'. HYENAS was a game I had on my radar for a bit and was semi-excited to tell my friends about because Apex Legends was in a really rough position and was growing stale in it's growth - we were looking for something else. It had some interesting movement mechanics, which myself and my friends were enamored by in Apex Legends, but nothing too crazy. I was hopeful. After about 2 testing runs, I phased out of HYENAS pretty hard and lost interest as it wasn't really what we were hoping it would be.
Breaking Convention
Fast forward to that 8-month mark, and the trailer for The Finals launches. It's this over-the-top explosive FPS with some crazy arena gimmicks, and holy shit it was pretty. The destruction was incredible, and the developers were touting server-side destruction so that it would be consistent for all players. The gameplay and graphics looked so familiar, and as it turned out, it was made by a bunch of ex-DICE devs. Count me in. Oh, and these were the same cats that released that short but impressive looking trailer for their other game Arc Raiders? Exceptionally promising pedigree, and an already promising duo of upcoming projects to boot. Couldn't be more excited. However... to this day, I don't know if I was getting struck by the Mandella Effect, but I swear I didn't see Nexon's publisher tag in the first few trailers. In any case, by the end of my first beta test, I was well aware and to say I was concerned would be an understatement.
The Good
Embark have done a phenomenal job at creating something unique in a market of Battle Royales and old titans slapping each other with wet noodles on bi-annual cycles. The Finals is insanely unique. Whereas a lot of games that try to break conventions like this tend to have iterations across many years and multiple development studios up to an eventual peak, the formula of The Finals feels like the final iteration of a genre that has never existed. Performance is top notch, the game does what it needs to do graphically and still has additional bells and whistles, and it had a near flawless release (all things considered). Were you to ask me, I could not imagine another game like The Finals existing in it's current exceptionally polished state. The next game like The Finals, whenever it comes out, will likely be exceptionally different. However...
The Bad
Lightning eventually breaks out of the bottle and disappears forever. The Finals, in all of its game design competency, has major issues for lasting in a market like today's and thankfully, for once, it's not actually due to it's MTX implementation and a greedy publisher (I say that cautiously, more on that later). No - the issue that The Finals has and why it's on a trajectory for shuttering is that it has almost zero skill expression. Let me explain.
Were The Finals released 12-ish years ago, it'd be a behemoth of an IP by now and likely would have changed the trajectory of the market in terms of player and audience capture. What do I mean by that? Well, lets look at games 10+ years ago - specifically FPS'. What was the primary appeal and objective? The appeal was an easy to pick-up game which allowed you to get into the action almost immediately. The objective? Click heads faster than your opposition. Game design around that time was rather linear in how it delivered the objective mechanism to the player. Give player gun, player click button; happy player. Competitive games have all existed, but competition now is vastly different.
Today, skill expression is the name of the game. It's not enough to click heads the fastest - that's not how you get your high anymore.
For DayZ, it was a masterful bait and deception. For PUBG, it was about maneuvering long before your opponent did and mastering weapon control. For Fortnite, it was about 'cranking 90s' and building the most optimal structure AROUND your opponent. For Overwatch, it was about chaining a series of abilities together into a combo that 6 players couldn't predict. For Apex Legends, it's about mastering movement in such a way that your opponent gets whiplash. Hell, even in Counterstrike - a game about holding angles - it's about mastering grenade throws.
The Finals... does none of that. You're not baiting anyone around fixed objectives. You're not out maneuvering when spawns are fixed. While structures exist around you, they serve more as an element of chaos than necessarily for control. There's no abilities to string together in some wombo-combo. Grenades are static and don't have a lot of physical attributes to facilitate against the environment like physics. And lastly, and this one hurts me the most because I was absolutely a sweaty try-hard in Apex Legends that spent hours in the shooting range practicing; while there is speed and movement in the game, you're not breaking the game's engineering to manipulate your movement in unintended ways - ways that become SO common... that the developer themselves puts those exploits in future season trailers for the game making them canon mechanics.
In other words, the skill ceiling is about as high as the desk players sit at to play the game. If you can move a mouse or a controller and click buttons, you're in. You just need to get familiar with the maps and weapons and... that's about it. :/
The Ugly
Don't believe me? Lets get numerical. Go look at Twitch stats for The Finals. Now, Twitch isn't an arbiter of truth in terms of a game's performance metrics, but it shows what players are watching. I'll save you the click: The Finals (at the time of writing) is the 215th most watched game. It's a whole 20 rows down on the front page. Now, players love watching high-skill play, but this also shows that even casual viewers still prefer casual games over The Finals. There is no external appeal. As much as I love this game, I'm not above a good joke, so I just wanted to highlight the irony of The Finals being a gameshow... and not being very popular as a show. Lol.
With all of the above said, the game is still in a relatively good position at this moment. Despite having very low player counts (no, I'm not the kind of person to spell doom for a game just because it's player count is dropping - it's on a normal interest decline curve), it requiring a low amount of players to start a game at all is a good thing. Unlike a BR or even a normal TDM-like game, you need a minimum of 9 players to start a round. A 9-player minimum goes a long way in expanding the ability to find a game with only 15,000-ish players. It puts it right in the comfy zone of co-op games like DRG or Vermintide. However, competitive games requiring a stalwart player count to be viable unlike co-op, so that's a bit of a problem right now.
So with that being said, it can always improve right? Something can change to bring back players and bolster it's numbers again, right? Well... um...

Nexon -- The Gravedigger

Nexon & Me -- We Don't Talk About It
My relationship with Nexon is long and... tenuous, at best. To me, Nexon is that family member that only ever comes to larger family get-togethers likes weddings or baby showers. They tend to give out some of the highest ticket gift cards but once the party is over, everyone finds that the giftcards are empty or deactivated. Nexon, over the years since it's arrival in the West in 2005-ish, has been flakey at best, and absent at worst. I'm envious of those who don't have a relationship with Nexon like I do because Nexon has truly been that family figure in my life of gaming since Maplestory - I have been apart of just about every major release pre-2016. I'm 31 now - that's over half of my life. Spoilers: It's not all been good. I'm happy to say that I've been able to communicate with a small handful of you over the last 18 months who have shared my same concerns and have the same history with them that I do.
I played Maplestory religiously. I played Mabinogi diligently. I played Kart Riders confusingly. I played Sudden Attack curiously. I played Combat Arms consistently. I played Vindictus excitedly. All of the previous, and a few more, intermixed with other games not made by Nexon - aside from Runescape, Nexon has been with me just as long, if not longer (depending on how you look at it). I know how Nexon is. I know how Nexon works. I know how Nexon behaves. With that said, it doesn't bring me any joy to pop the virgin cherry for some of you who don't know much about them.
Nexon Doing Nexon Things
I'll only be mentioning relevant titles here to paint the picture that needs to be seen.

• Maplestory - Nexon's most popular MMO. A mere shadow of what it used to be and caught in controversy of trying to be fresh, but appeal to players of the past. Extremely underpopulated now, and generally only played by people who spend money. Maplestory is arguably the birth place of MTX whales in the West. Whaling and spending is so engrained in Maplestory now, it's considered part of it's active culture. Still active, but in perpetual suffering.
  
• Vindictus - One of the very first (if not the first - feel free to correct me) MMO's in the West to introduce brawl-style active combat. Extremely modest MMO at the time. Lackluster story, but very appealing gameplay loop. Practically dead today, and it has succumbed (not necessarily a bad thing) to the 'Korean Developer' trope in introducing a bunch of scantily clad ladies. While the combat loop is still rock-solid, it has aged and others have now done it better (See Blade & Soul, etc). Still alive today, but I'm using that term very loosely.
  

(From here, the only relevant conversation pertaining to this thread will be about FPS')

• Combat Arms - THE absolute F2P FPS behemoth in the West (while Sudden Attack was still in the East). It's both surprising and not surprising how many people don't know or have ever heard about this game. In a time where CSS was still the primary talk in the West, Combat Arms started bringing the Eastern F2P heat. With the largest arsenal of any FPS game to ever be released in the West, Combat Arms was a beacon for the F2P formula behind Maplestory. The beginning of the end occurred with the release of the specialist class which signaled Nexon's decline into P2W depravity. It was now another thorn in the side of players beyond the rampant cheating. Combat Arms declined very quickly beyond that point, and was eventually sold to another company - starts with a 'V'. I can't remember.
  
• Sudden Attack - I'd have to double-check, but I'm fairly confident that this is still the most-played FPS in the world between SK and China primarily due to it's accessibility. While still active today, Western servers were shuttered in 2014. Sudden Attack 2 ceased development less than 2 months after it's release.
  
• Dirty Bomb - After Sudden Attack 1's shuttering, Dirty Bomb came onto the scene. Most people don't know it, but Dirty Bomb was one of the first major contenders to break into the scene that Overwatch eventually solidified. However, Nexon and Splash Damage parted ways, and less than a year later, Dirty Bomb shuttered as well.
  
• LawBreakers - We all remember this well roasted chestnut, don't we?
  

With all of the above information about Nexon's history, its fair to surmise that Nexon has a turbulent cycle serving as a publisher for games. This does not bode well for Embark.
I'd like everyone to remember that the people we engage with on a daily basis in the Discord are passionate Embark folk. This critique of Nexon has no bearing on Embark, however it's important to remember that they'll likely be affected, and it's a shame. Even in the best case scenario that The Finals doesn't shut down, but just maintains a low player-count, it will not serve well under Embark. Unfortunately it will affect Embark's pedigree more than it would ever affect Nexon as Nexon has the same priveledge and power of the likes of EA.
I'll be honest, when I first found out Nexon is the primary publishing house behind Embark, Nexon's history of shuttering games wasn't the first thing I thought of. The first thing I actually thought of was it's history of MTX in it's game. We all joke about horse armor and FIFA packs, but Maplestory led the charge of overbearing MTX in the West. Given today's game market, I was admittedly expecting a lot worse in terms of monetization for The Finals. I'm happy to report that I'm pleasantly surprised with it's current state. I still wouldn't say it's TRUE 'micro' like Helldiver's, but it's way better than a lot of other offerings, especially for me personally coming from a game like Apex Legends.
However, Nexon's influence still can't be ignored. You see, with a history like Nexon's you probably expect what we've all witnessed in the market over the last decade, but Nexon doesn't operate that way. They have a penchant of being rather silent during most, if not all controversies. Hell, just in general - controversies aside. Unlike bodies that we're familiar with like EA, Take-Two, Ubisoft and the like, Nexon doesn't speak outside of their games often, if ever. If you were at a public execution, all of the companies we're familiar with would likely be the Officiant at the pulpit. But Nexon? They're the executioner - completely silent and performing a duty without remorse. This is always how they've acted.

Closing Thoughts

I know I said above that the MTX concerns for The Finals kind of faded away for me as it doesn't seem to be an issue we'll have to worry about, and while it's not the main point of this post, I still find it necessary for players to keep in the back of their head, especially since Embark have other games coming out. Were The Finals not to shutter due to low player count, this is my PSA to all players moving forward, whether it be about The Finals or beyond: Nexon cannot be trusted.
"Well, duh! You can't trust companies anyway, nor should you. It's a company. It's incentive is profit."
To that I say, "That's not my point".
In today's market, we're typically used to a controversy happening in the game on top of whatever PR blunders is going on with the organization, but that's not what would really happen here. The Finals doesn't have any issues beyond it's declining player count, but I want everyone to remain aware of Nexon's moves going forward. Just because we don't necessarily see the smoke here doesn't mean that there isn't a fire somewhere else.
So, for your own interest if you'd like to research on your own, here are some topics of concern:

1. Variety of game closures and sunsets under contentious situations with developers and publishing partners alike.
2. Account security breaches (I guess a more relevant tangent would be GameGuard. Nexon was the first to widely use GameGuard when Maplestory came to the West. I personally don't care, but I know some others would.)
3. Various cases of government scrutiny world-wide due to addictive Gachapon implementations.
4. Speaking of Gachapon (and P2W), their recent suit around manipulating odds for a P2W item outside of it's listed values: https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20240312050604
5. And lastly, most recently, Nexon pulling back public support for Maplestory's would-be world-first level 300 player when he used the opportunity to address genuine concerns about the game's current state, including the above lawsuit.

TL;DR - Some rough edges, but the tale is delivered in a unique style that is an entertaining take on the story archetype.
I'll begin this with a look at the music. The soundtrack definitely caught my interest, and somewhat reminded me of the futurepop music of 'Mind.in.a.Box'. it's electronic, but softer and mellow, which reflects well the dystopian setting, and the daunting themes of the storyline. Personally, I'm not a fan of musicals, and there are a couple of musical pieces included. However I'm not opposed to them either, and I'd say that these musical scenes with characters singing, did convey a feeling of a future folklore tale being handed down through song, in a society that was no longer able to record video essays on youtube. Because the music overall was not too energetic, and introspective, I'd say it's a syle of music that lends itself well to extended playing or binge-listening, something which episodic audio dramas should keep in mind, generally.
The sound effects were exactly as i like them - present, but subdued and playing second fiddle to dialogue and narration. (SIDE NOTE: I'd commend the audio engineer on this podcast since the initial teaser trailer release did have audio issues, but they've definitely improved for the full release of episode one, showing some care and effort in their work.) The voice effects/filters, were a selection (or configuration) that I thought worked well to show the body modification and mechanization that some characters had undergone; with the authorities having modulated, processed vocals, and the robots having chittering insectoid type vocals.
The story itself, while it is yet another iteration of a trope, I believe it deserves praise for a unique execution of it. The dystopia is filled out in a satisfactory way - the ruling class, and the enforcing authorities are not just a conglomeration of bad guys in uniform, but instead are introduced as a functioning hierarchy, with distinct functional arms to the organization; and the downtrodden class do have specialized groups, like the nuns. The culture and lore are well incorporated, with religion having its foreboding significance, and with the tale of the five martyrs kept cherished at the back of everyone's mind.
I particularly liked the implementation of slang in this world. The common slang did not have the feel of tik-tok newspeak, but instead had the feel of weathered turns of phrase that eventually just became the way to describe and identify things. this isn't overused, showing up only a couple times, and I think that's a good thing.
My critiques would mainly centre around the voice acting. The voice actors do seem like they still have room to grow, and I believe the thing holding them back is the timing of the delivery. While the intonations and inflections are serviceable, there are none of the mini-pauses that show the character internalizing and processing the new information, instead coming across like something read off a page. To illustrate the point, I'd point to Guardian 57's dilemma of whether to kill the nun. I didn't get the sense of gears turning in his mind as he weighed his options. Note: the exception to this is Seargeant Deed, whose VA nailed that performance, good job there. I believe that the gaps in voice acting should improve as the VA's get more time to step into their characters, and have more read-throughs with each other.
Also a final note here on the technical side of things - There have been some teething issues with publishing the first episode, with no rss link initially given out, and some difficulty finding the podcast on apps. These teething issues are to do with the platform and the publishing process, and I'd not criticize the team on this too harshly for not getting it right the first time, hopefully they get it all figured out soon.
To conclude, it's definitely a new team, putting forward a new work and finding their footing, but the first episode definitely gripped me with a good story, exceptional world-building, unique characters, and distinct storytelling style. Definitely worth a listen.

Leviathan, the Eikon of Water concept art
Leviathan, the lost Eikon of Water, has finally been found! After months of waiting, the Rising Tide downloadable content (DLC) has been released and with it, I am once again rambling about the mythological, religious, and cultural inspirations behind the Eikons of Final Fantasy XVI. If you would like to check out any of my previous posts on the subject of Eikons, you can find them here:

1.) Phoenix

2.) Ifrit

3.) Shiva

4.) Ramuh

5.) Garuda

6.) Titan

7.) Bahamut

8.) Odin

As I’ve said in the past, if you feel that I may have said something wrong, or if you would like to add to what information I have provided; by all means please do so. I absolutely welcome the discussion.
The sea serpent Leviathan, like most of the Eikons, has been a staple of the Final Fantasy series since its introduction as one of the original summons#Summon_Magic) from 1990’s Final Fantasy III. While modern usage of the terms “leviathan” and “behemoth” are often used to denote something large and imposing, these words actually originate as the names of two creatures from the Tanakh (or Hebrew Bible). According to the verses 40:15-41:34 in the Book of Job, Leviathan and Behemoth are two gigantic and nigh indestructible animals born around the same time as the creation of the first two humans Adam and Eve, with Behemoth residing over the wilderness east of the Garden of Eden called Duidain and Leviathan bound to the watery Abyss) as stated in verses 60:7-10 in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. While the term abyss may bring to mind the idea of a bottomless hole or even an underworld such as the Greek Hades, Hebrew Sheol, or Christian Hell; the Septuagint, the earliest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, often uses the term abyss to instead refer to deep bodies of water. In fact, Abyss is the translated noun for the Hebrew Tehom, or the “deep” primordial waters from which the god Yahweh formed the world after the creation of light as stated by the verses 1:2-10 in the Book of Genesis; which is but one example of the cosmic ocean motif, whereby existence is conceptualized as originating from a watery void. I find it very interesting then that the Abyss is referenced several times in the Rising Tide DLC, such as in the name of Leviathan’s Eikonic ability Abyssal Tear; the Motes of Water adage “Know that even should you walk Abyss, our hands will guide you home” from the Minwu Arm Ring description; or the description of the Radiant Tidestrike weapon that says “Surge did the tide, the water rising as if it were some mighty whale stranding itself upon the shore. Behold, the Devourer of Worlds. The beast within whose foul belly our hopes are carried unto the Abyss. - Eikonomachy - Book of Currents 15:40-41”.
From the aforementioned verses of the diegetic Book of Currents, as well as one of the Active Time Lore Entries for Leviathan that states “Old writings clearly speak of Dominants past summoning great whale-like creatures capable of swallowing entire cities…”; we can possibly see a reference to Leviathan) swallowing the protagonist Firion and his allies on their way to the Mysidian Tower in Final Fantasy II. However, I would suggest that these quotes go further than mere references to past games and are actually an allusion to the parable of Jonah surviving in the belly of a whale from the eponymous Book of Jonah. For those unfamiliar with the story, the Hebrew prophet Jonah was tasked by God to preach on His behalf to the citizenry of Nineveh in the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Jonah instead refuses the call, and attempts to sail across the sea to Tarshish. On the journey, Jonah and the sailors he is accompanied by are caught in a huge storm, and believing that Jonah’s dismissal of God is the cause, the sailors thus throw him overboard. God then sends a whale to swallow Jonah, with the intention of preventing the Israelite from drowning. Miraculously surviving in the whale’s stomach for 3 days, Jonah vows to do God’s bidding and is thus safely returned to shore, whereby he travels to Nineveh and beseeches the citizens to renounce their wicked ways, lest they be visited by calamity. This story is meant to illustrate that Yahweh is a merciful god who allows for second chances, giving not only Jonah, but also the Ninevites the opportunity to learn from their mistakes and redirect their course of actions.
With this parable in mind, I would like to mention that in 1949, literary professor Joseph Campbell published “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”; a work of comparative mythology in which he proposed his idea of the Monomyth (later called the Hero’s Journey). Campbell’s theory of the Monomyth posits that while most narratives involving a heroic protagonist may have differing contents, these stories also typically follow a similar pattern; that being a three-act structure comprised of 17 subset stages. One such stage in Campbell’s model is the Belly of the Whale (sometimes also referred to as the Abyss), one of the literally or figuratively lowest points in the story for the protagonist in which the hero must engage in introspection and commence a process of self-transformation if they are to be equipped to finish their journey. This stage acts as a symbolic death and rebirth for the protagonist, with some Christians even interpreting Jonah’s story as actually being an allegory for Jesus Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection.
A prime example of this stage can be seen in Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, whereby the eponymous puppet Pinocchio and his creator Geppetto are swallowed by the Terrible Dogfish; with the typically irresponsible and selfish Pinocchio instead performing a self-sacrificial act in order to save his “father”, which he is thus rewarded for by being brought back to life as a human by the Fairy with Turquoise Hair. Viewing the Pinnochio narrative as an example of a more modern mythical epic, Thomas J. Morrissey and Richard Wunderlich state in “Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio”; “Gods can die and be reborn, or rise from the dead. Such mythological events probably imitate the annual cycle of vegetative birth, death, and renascence, and they often serve as paradigms for the frequent symbolic deaths and rebirths encountered in literature. Two such symbolic renderings are most prominent: re-emergence from a journey to hell and rebirth through metamorphosis. Journeys to the underworld [Katabasis] are a common feature of Eurasian literary epics: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, and Dante all benefit from the knowledge and power they put on after such descents. Rebirth through metamorphosis, on the other hand, is a motif generally consigned to fantasy or speculative literature… These two figurative manifestations of the death-rebirth trope are rarely combined; however, Carlo Collodi’s great fantasy-epic, The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a work in which a hero experiences symbolic death and rebirth through both infernal descent and metamorphosis”. We as the player also experience this Belly of the Whale stage in Final Fantasy XVI, when our heroes Clive Rosfield and Jill Warwick confront the Dominant of Darkness Barnabas Tharmr on the seafloor of the sundered Naldia Narrow, appropriately labeled as the Abyss, whereby Clive is soundly defeated by Barnabas for a second time. Fleeing their assailant, Clive and Jill consummate their love for one another on the shore of Ash, with Clive acquiring a portion of the Eikon Shiva’s powers from Jill so that he may finally triumph over Barnabas in a battle of physical prowess and ideals; proving to the false prophet and his God that compassion and the desire for freedom will always overcome any adversity.
With all this talk of whales, I should mention that from the descriptions as given in the Book of Job, Behemoth sounds to resemble that of a large ox or hippopotamus, while Leviathan is suggested as being similar to that of the tanninim) or “great whales” mentioned several times in the Hebrew Bible. In fact, Islamic folklore has its own variant of this terrestrial and aquatic duo, that being the large bull Kujata and the even larger whale Bahamut; as outlined by the medieval cosmographer Zakariya al-Qazwini in his seminal work “The Wonders of Creation”. Even though I am going to hazard a guess that the name of the Kuza Beast), a variant of the Behemoth enemy in several Final Fantasy games, is named after Kujata; it is quite obvious on the other hand that the draconic Eikon Bahamut borrows its name from the Islamic whale of the same name as well as the dragon god Bahamut) from the Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game. While the Book of Job describes Leviathan as being a whale or even a crocodile as suggested by a footnote in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, verse 27:1 in the Book of Isaiah instead equates Leviathan to a sea serpent or dragon, with the Book of Job description also making it a point to mention Leviathan’s fearsome fiery breath. Given its status as a tutelary god for the Japanese-inspired nation of Wutai in Final Fantasy VII, it could be argued that Leviathan in the Final Fantasy series also shares similarities with Eastern dragons, such as the Chinese Lóng or Japanese Ryū; beneficent, serpentine deities of water and rain.
It is presumed that the figure and name of Leviathan actually originates from the older Canaanite sea monster Lôtān, whose name in the Ugaritic language meant “coiled” and was given the epithets “the fugitive serpent” or “the wriggling serpent”. In the first two tablets of the fragmentary Ugaritic Baal Cycle text, the storm god Baal (Lord) Hadad engages in a feud with the deification of the sea Yammu) to succeed their father El) as the ruler of the gods. At some point in this first chapter of the Baal Cycle, Hadad strikes down the seven-headed serpent Lôtān, who given the missing pieces of the text, could either be a servant of or another name for Yammu, with it also being believed that the monster was a zoomorphic representation of the Lebanese Litani River. Why I bring this up is to illustrate that Hadad’s defeat of Lôtān is but one example of the Chaoskampf mytheme, a pattern found in numerous Indo-European mythologies whereby a younger storm god or culture hero representing order and human civilization slays an ancient serpent or dragon associated with water that represents primordial chaos); perhaps a sentiment held by early agricultural riverine civilizations wishing to triumph over the constant and often devastating threat of floods.
One of the oldest examples of this mytheme is that of the Mesopotamian god Marduk’s dismemberment of Tiamat. According to the Babylonian Enūma Eliš, in the beginning there existed only Tiamat, the female personification of salt water; and Abzu, the male personification of fresh water. From the union of the two primeval waters sprang forth the first generation of gods called the Anunnaki. One such god, Enki (or Ea) would capture and kill Abzu after he plotted to kill his children due to the commotion they were causing. Enraged by Enki’s actions, Tiamat gave birth to eleven monstrous children to wage war against the gods along with her new consort Kingu, who possessed the Tablet of Destinies); the mark of divine rule. Marduk, the son of Enki, challenged Tiamat and her monsters, eventually slaying his opponents with lightning and storm winds. Defeated, Tiamat’s body was sliced in twain, with the two halves becoming the sky and earth. From an earlier promise made with the Anunnaki and the Igigi (lesser gods) as well as the acquisition of the Tablet of Destinies from the beaten Kingu, Marduk was made king of the gods; later mixing the blood of Kingu with clay to also become the creator of mankind.
Through the lens of the Chaoskampf mytheme, we can start to see connections between Tiamat’s dismemberment, the defeat of the multi-headed Lôtān, and Leviathan form. The non-canonical Book of Enoch actually specifies that the land-dwelling Behemoth is male, while the aquatic Leviathan is female; possibly creating an inadvertent association between Leviathan and the sea goddess and mother of monsters Tiamat. This may also be why Leviathan’s Chronolith Trial is named the Hand of Tethys. While still following the moons of Saturn naming convention, it is very fitting that the trial is also named after the Greek Tethys); wife of the world-encompassing river Oceanus and mother to the male river gods and female water nymphs called the Potamoi and Oceanids, respectively. Furthering the connections to Tiamat and Lôtān, several accounts in the Hebrew Bible describe Yawheh triumphing over the forces of the sea, such as in Isaiah 51:9-10 “Awake, awake, arm of the Lord, clothe yourself with strength! Awake, as in days gone by, as in generations of old. Was it not you who cut Rahab) to pieces, who pierced that monster through? Was it not you who dried up the sea, the waters of the great deep, who made a road in the depths of the sea so that the redeemed may cross over?” and Job 26:12-13 “By his power he churned up the sea; by his wisdom he cut Rahab to pieces. By his breath the skies became fair; his hand pierced the gliding serpent”. It is believed that Rahab, while occasionally used as a flowery term for Egypt or arrogance, was also a sea serpent either comparable to or synonymous with Leviathan. While Leviathan’s death at the hands of Yahweh in Isaiah 27:1 is viewed as a metaphor for the enemies of Israel who will submit to the Hebrew God, the Chaoskampf and the connection with the Canaanite Lôtān is further shown in verse 74:14 from the Book of Psalms, which says “Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilderness”; which is where the name of the trophy for beating Leviathan on Final Fantasy mode, Thou Brakest the Head, comes from.
Along with the account of Leviathan’s death in Psalms 74:12-14, several other Jewish sources, such as the Second Book of Esdras 6:47-52, the Apocalypse of Baruch 29:4, and the Bava Batra tractate in the Talmud state that Yahweh will slay Leviathan and Behemoth so that their flesh shall be given as food and shelter to the righteous during the End of Days and the Messianic Age. This may explain why the Behemoth King in FFXVI has several attacks referencing Christian eschatology from the Book of Revelation, such as the Four Horsemen; personifications of War, Conquest, Famine, and Death that herald the Last Judgment; and the Apocalypse, another term for a revelation which has since become synonymous with a cataclysmic end-time event, like the battle at Armageddon for instance. Leviathan and Behemoth’s statuses as eventual sacrifices is very similar to the role that Leviathan and its Dominant unfortunately play in Final Fantasy XVI.
Both DLCs, the Echoes of the Fallen and the Rising Tide, deal with themes of rectifying the sins of the past; whereby the Fallen and the Motes of Water engaged in questionable behavior in an attempt to create their own Mothercrystals to disastrous effect. The Motes of Water, a central focus of the Rising Tide, are a tribe originating from the southern coast of the continent of Ash and hosts to the Dominants of the Eikon Leviathan. After the loss of their Mothercrystal Drake’s Horn, the tribe migrated across the twin continent of Storm; where they were mercilessly persecuted by several groups, particularly the Greagorian faithful of the burgeoning Holy Empire of Sanbreque, causing the tribe and their Eikon to become “lost” to history. Due to their nomadic nature as well as Sanbreque’s similarities with the Roman and Holy Roman Empires, one could say that the Motes of Water mirror the Jewish Diaspora (exile) and transformation of the faith after the Roman Empire’s siege on Jerusalem) and the destruction of the Second Temple during the First Jewish-Roman War; or perhaps one could say the tribe is treated in a similar fashion to the oft demonized itinerant Romani people of eastern Europe. Either way, the Motes of Water are meant to represent the “Other”; ostracized outsiders to the customs of Storm who hid themselves away from the rest of the world to avoid further religious persecution.
After finding sanctuary in the northern territory of Mysidia, the Motes of Water tried to create for themselves a new Mothercrystal to replace the Northern Territories’ own shattered Mothercrystal called Drake’s Eye. The story of the Motes of Water is one of loss and a constant fight to carve out a place in the world to call their own, so it is no surprise then that they wished to regain something taken away from them so many years ago. However, the tribe would engage in a terrible act, enraging their Eikon Leviathan that laid dormant within the infant Dominant Waljas, and freeze both the baby and the Eikon in time to essentially act as an aether battery. Unsuccessful in turning Waljas into the heart of a Mothercrystal, all the tribe achieved was robbing the poor baby of its life and autonomy, imprisoning the Dominant and the tidal wave it summoned in that moment where the tribe’s greatest sin occurred for 80 years.
This frozen tsunami, dubbed the Surge, is not only a monument to the tribe’s greatest shame, but is also a constant looming threat over the tribe’s village of Haven; a reminder to never again engage in such a transgression, lest they be met with watery doom. This mirrors not only Jonah preaching to the Ninevites to change their ways, but also God’s warnings against individuals sacrificing children to Moloch in the Book of Leviticus 20:2-5. In fact, as ProfNoctis suggests in his video “Final Fantasy XVI Lecture Stream: The Mythos of Leviathan Part 2”; Leviathan and the Surge are symbols of human and divine regret. Ultima, the creator of mankind and the Mothercrystals, refers to Leviathan as its “most profaned fragment”; due to the Eikon being rested from its creator’s control and the act of creating a man-made Mothercrystal being a repeat of the Fallen’s blasphemous attempts at attaining godhood during the War of the Magi and the Sins of Dzemekys, flagrant displays of mankind’s development of free will which is anathema to Ultima’s collective identity.
As a symbol of divine regret, the Surge could be seen as a parallel to the Flood from the Book of Genesis. Deluge or flood myths are motifs that can often be found amongst cultures residing near the Mediterranean Sea, Black Sea, and Persian Gulf such as Egypt, Greece, and Israel; with these stories usually recounting a tale in which a deity or deities summon a world-wide flood as a form of divine retribution. One of the earliest examples is the Mesopotamian Epic of Atra-Hasis, in which mankind was created by the gods to act as servants and laborers. However, due to overpopulation, the storm god Enlil seeks to reduce their numbers by bringing forth a great flood. Enki, seen as a benefactor of mankind, warns the human Atra-Hasis about the flood, telling him to build a boat to protect himself, his family, and his livestock from the deluge. After seven days, the waters recede and Enki and Enlil agree on other means of maintaining the human population. This story is also thought to have been later adapted in Tablet XI of the Epic of Gilgamesh, where the survivor of the flood is renamed Utnapishtim; though both the Atra-Hasis and Gilgamesh flood accounts seem to originate from an even older source called the Eridu Genesis. Similarly, the Greeks also had a deluge myth, as outlined in the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where Deucalion, the human son of the divine Prometheus, is warned by his father to build a chest for himself and his wife Pyrrha to escape a gigantic flood that the storm god Zeus plans to bring forth as a response to the insufficient offering given to him by Lycaon), the king of Arcadia); with the pair washing up on Mount Parnassus nine days after the storm.
There are several theories, such as the Black Sea Deluge Hypothesis, that propose that the ancient Middle East did indeed experience a large flood at some point in the very distant past. Given that flood myths are thus believed to have originated from Mesopotamia, it should come as no surprise that the Hebrew flood narrative bears similarities to the previously discussed deluge myths as well. According to chapters 6-9 in the Book of Genesis, God grows increasingly distraught over the wicked nature of the humans descended from Adam and Eve and their inadvertent creation of sin, and so decides to reset creation to a state of watery chaos. God warns one of the few moral men, the Antediluvian patriarch named Noah, about His plan to flood the world and instructs him to build an ark to house himself, his family, and two of each animal to be the first creatures to inhabit the new world. After the firmament breaks forth and floods the world for 40 days, Noah’s Ark washes up on Mount Ararat. Noah then builds an altar, with God forming a covenant with Noah whereby He declares to never again summon a flood to devastate the world. As Genesis 9:9-17 states, this promise between Noah and God is commemorated by the rainbow, a symbol of peace; which as ProfNoctis points out, also appears once Clive saves Waljas.
Through a certain perspective, the Flood could be seen as a sort of baptism, a spiritual cleansing of the world through physical water. Baptism is considered one of the 7 sacraments of the Christian Catholic denomination; a rite of initiation whereby the individual joining the faith is either submerged in or sprinkled with water three times, representing the purification of sin and the grace given by the Holy Trinity. This is not unlike the Rite of Immersion that the infant Waljas is granted at the conclusion of the Rising Tide DLC; a ceremony for all babies born into the Motes of Water in which the initiate is sprinkled with mountainous rain water from Maiden’s March, river water from Riversmeet, and sea water from Tailwind Bay. The water used in this rite is used as a metaphor for life’s journey, likened by the tribe to that of a river, with this revealing that the Motes of Water hold a very cyclical view of life in a similar fashion to the Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation or the Lifestream from Final Fantasy VII. As the descriptions for the 3 kinds of water used in the ceremony state; “The rain that falls upon the mountains of Mysidia emerges in the springs of Maiden’s March. Thus the water collected from said springs represents birth-the fountainhead from which the river of life begins”, “In the Riversmeet valley, several tributaries merge into a single stream, where clear currents and roiling eddies swim side by side. Its water represents life-a course complete with myriad meanderings, yet one that runs inexorably from source to sea”, and “The Mysidian river empties into the ocean amid the shallows of Tailwind Bay, and thus its water represents death-the stillness that lies beyond the end of the river of life, and from whence the raindrops are born anew”. In fact, the symbol for the village of Haven is meant to be the combination of Leviathan’s scales and the river called the Ceaseless Rill, “...the circle of life that has neither beginning nor end”, not unlike the serpentine symbol of the Ouroboros. I would thus argue that not only does Leviathan represent regret and retribution, but also the chaotic journey of life.
If it’s not already apparent, I find Leviathan to be very interesting. I want to thank you all for sticking around and reading the whole thing, as I know this was a lot. If you would like to check out some more information about Leviathan, I would recommend checking out the videos “Leviathan of Final Fantasy VS the Leviathan of the Bible - FF16 The Rising Tide” by Country Kratos and “A Brief History of Final Fantasy Summons Final Fantasy Lore” by Alleyway Jack.
With the conclusion of both DLCs, Clive and by extension the player, is granted one additional Eikonic power. As such, I am actually going to do one more essay, which I will post next week. I hope you look forward to it and thank you again for reading this. Have a fantastic day!
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