yeecaw

But that can wait. Your guest is tired, jumpy, and understandably in need of time to rest and recover. You won’t need her help for the warfare aspect anyway. You ensure your demonic servants will protect her with their lives and make her feel safe and welcome. Then you set aside some time in your busy schedule of conquest to check on the poor girl. Purely to determine whether she’s in prime condition for manipulating, of course. Your future puppet ruler will be more likely to cooperate if you build a solid foundation of respect and trust, after all.

Years of serving as the Dark Lord have taught you that your minions work harder when you treat them well. So you provide your young guest with everything she requests, within reason of course. She says she hasn’t slept well lately because her stuffed animal was left behind when she fled home. You ask if there are any other things of hers she misses from her old home. With a now completed list, you send your most covert operatives to the enemy palace to execute a most wicked heist of a stuffed animal and the princess’s dog dubbed Sir Meatball, as well as a few books she would read for comfort. You congratulate yourself on how evil it is of you to steal a dog. And just for good measure you have your minions perform reconnaissance on the palace. You’ll have to invade it soon anyway. May as well multitask.

The interesting thing is the hero the enemy sends to fight you. The chosen one it would seem, although it continues to baffle you how young he is. Young and impressionable. He barely knows how to hold that magic sword he wields. It’s barely light enough for him to lift. You send your winged minions to carry him toward your evil castle of dread and terror. You greet him at the landing pad on the roof. He insists on dueling you, even as his sword shakes in his sweaty palms. The prophecy says he will defeat you in a one-on-one duel. Very well, you decide. If something goes wrong you have medics on hand. You wouldn’t want someone to die from a friendly duel. He’s no match for you, you soon find. You humor him for a while. He obviously came a long way to duel you after all, and you can tell he’s trying very hard to hit you with that sword. You give him a few passing tips as you fight, and he thanks you awkwardly.

Then the princess interrupts your duel. “Maximus!” She chides, “you promised to take me dragon riding this afternoon!”

You turn to your dark secretary of doom, Jerry, who squints at the evil schedule of hopelessness and cries out. “Ah! She’s right, my lord. My sincerest apologies.”

“That’s alright, my faithful minion,” you say while holding the tip of the chosen’s sword between two fingers. “This whole duel thing was a bit of a spontaneous thing, and I should have looked at the schedule first.” You look down at the boy. “I’m sorry, child, but it seems I have a commitment to fulfill with the dear princess. Can we reschedule this duel for a later date?”

“Wh-what? No! The duel has already started, you can’t just back out like that!” He says, trying with all his might to pry his sword free from your grip.

“Very well,” you say with a sigh. “In that case, I forfeit, and you win the duel by default. There, that fulfills the prophecy. Would you like a ride home?”

The chosen one blinks with shock. “I-“

“Oh, what am I saying? You’ve come all this way, you must be exhausted. You ought to stay for dinner later. We’re having doom chicken soup of eternal darkness! It’s absolutely to die for.”

The boy looks at the princess quizzically. She assures him it’s just normal chicken soup. You vehemently deny this, saying you’re evil cook of evilness Frederick is supernaturally good at his job, and to refer to the fruits of his labor as “just normal soup” would be an insult to all the work he puts in.

You take the princess dragon-riding, and later that evening during dinner the chosen one breaks down crying. You ask him what’s wrong. He opens up about his confusion. He’d spent his entire journey up on this point dreading the responsibility thrust upon him. He’d barely survived several encounters with monsters and demons and now that he’s here, he’s questioning his entire perspective. After all, he says, you’ve been treating him better than anyone ever did back home and despite the spiky black armor you seem so genuinely kind. He doesn’t know what to do, he confesses.

You reassure him that no one expects anything of him, and that he can stay as long as he’d like, or he could simply go back home in the morning. You won’t stop him. He says he still has to fulfill the other half of the prophecy, freeing the princess from those who would cause her harm. The princess assures him that she is not in any danger where she is, and that if he really wants to fulfill the prophecy he ought to help you overthrow her parents.

“Th-the enemy, my lord. Th-they’re using h-healing magic as a t-torture method! I-I was the only one of my scouting party to escape capture, a-and I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t bare to observe for long before it was t-t-too much. I-I panicked, your evilness! The way they made their skin boil and swell with cancerous growths a-and…oh dark gods below, the bones, the protruding bones!”

Your hand rests on the lower right side of your rib cage, where you can still feel the stumps of the bones that grew outward and pierced through your flesh all those years ago. You know from experience what those scouts must be going through, and though you’d never show it in front of your subjects, you’re terrified.

As he finishes his tale, Gregory breaks down into sobs, begging for forgiveness from his captured comrades under his breath. You gently tell him it’s alright, that there was nothing he could have done. At least by running away he ensures that this information got back to you. You make a vow to him that the crimes of the enemy will not go unpunished. Once Gregory has been led out of the room, the door closing behind him, you lean back into your spiky black chair at the head of the map table and rub your temples. You ask Jerry if that was the last of the scouts who returned today. He says yes, that was the last one. You thank the gods below, and begin planning a counterattack on the borders, as well as a rescue operation for the captured scouts. You have faith in their capacity to resist revealing valuable information to the enemy, but with torture methods like that…

You push the thought out of your mind for the time being. You have faith in your evil minions, and the amount of subtle manipulation of impressionable children you have to do per day has recently doubled. Over the next few weeks, you start teaching the chosen one how to properly wield a sword. He’s a quick learner, and though you’re still much more experienced and can effortlessly defeat him in a serious match, you know from experience that minions tend to learn better from positive reinforcement, so you’re sure to point out what he’s doing well just as often as you criticize him. The princess sits in on many of your practice sessions with the chosen one, and though she shows no interest in wielding a sword herself, she does pay enough attention to be able to shout out advice to him mid-sparring match, which the chosen one says he doesn’t mind. The two of them were fast friends from the start, and having lived together for almost a month now, they’ve become quite close. Good, you think, rubbing your hands together menacingly. Strong bonds of trust between your minions makes them more powerful. Together with the two of them, you will conquer the enemy kingdom and expand your empire in all its dark glory.

“Maximush?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Ethan. You’ll choke.” The princess chides.

The chosen one takes a moment to swallow his food. The three of you are having a picnic atop the all-seeing watchtower of evil oversight, enjoying the view of your land from high up.

“Maximus?”

“Yes, Ethan?”

“Everyone’s the hero of their own story, right?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“So why do you go out of your way to make yourself seem evil and scary? Don’t you think you’re on the side of good?”

You take a pause to think how to answer. “Oh, well, plenty of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s amusing coming up with overly complicated titles for all the more mundane aspects of my life. But I suppose it’s just that I decided that I didn’t need to prove myself to people who judge based on superficial things like appearances.”

The children watch you intently as you take a bite of your Dark Ham Sandwich of Broken Dreams. It seems they want you to elaborate. You swallow the bite, then continue.

“In my youth, I was feared and hated just by nature of the type of magic I used. Dark magic, they called it. It perplexed me, the superficial reasons for which they would argue that my magic was inherently immoral. Why was necromancy considered evil? Those people are dead, it’s not like they need their bones for anything anymore. Why do we have all these peasants barely getting by, working themselves to the bone in the hot sun, when we could re-purpose the skeletons of the dead and triple our crop output? And sure, demons don’t tend to be beautiful by conventional standards, but I’ve found that they’re fair to a fault, they follow rules to the letter, they have a strong sense of justice, and they enjoy games quite a bit. It seemed to me that they’d make stellar lawyers and government officials. They punish wicked souls in the underworld, yes, but the key word is wicked! I never understood why people frowned upon creating contracts with them. So, eventually, I suppose I gave up trying to fight their perception of me and embraced it instead. I decided I wouldn’t just use dark magic, I’d be a dark lord, king of demons and commander of an army of the undead! I began reanimating a lot of corpses to help me build my empire, had them work at night instead of in the day so they wouldn’t burn to ash in the sun. I recruited other black magi and taught them what I knew about efficient use of undead for manual labor. I started making contracts with hordes of demons, offering them reasonable pay and homes of their own if they’d come live and work in my empire. 200 years I spent building a nation from the ground up. Another perk of dark magic is that it tends to extend your lifespan. With necromancy, dead tissue can be reanimated, and after playing games with demons for fun for about 20 years you get good enough at it to be able to beat the grim reaper in a wager for your life with relative ease. Not that my dozens of active demonic contracts don’t make me functionally immortal in and of themselves. If I die, my contracts become void and all my demonic servants go back to hell, and I’m told they’d rather stay here for as long as possible if they can help it. No stars in the underworld.”

The children stare at you for a moment.

“Two hundred years?!” The princess exclaims.

“Is that why you never take that helmet off? Is it just a skull underneath?” The chosen one asks.

You laugh. You inform the chosen that no, it isn’t a skull, just rather grotesque. You promise to show them both once they’ve finished eating and you’re out of the sun. You burn rather easily in the day.

Later that night, you’re tucking the small princess into bed when she asks you something. She says she was always told back home that light was good magic and dark was bad, but all she’s ever seen light magic used for was to hide any visible bruises before she could make a public appearance, and from what she’s seen, dark magic seems to be the good magic. You pass her her stuffed animal and tell her that in truth there’s no good or bad magic. Magic is a tool, and any type of magic can be used for great good, or great evil. There’s no bad magic. Just bad people. As you blow out the candle and walk out of the princess’s chambers, she calls after you.

“Maximus?”

You pause in the doorway.

“I don’t think your face was that gross.”

“Yes, well I’m sure it was mere coincidence that Ethan threw up his lunch after seeing it. Goodnight, Penelope. Sleep well.”

When your generals return, it’s with pitiful news of half-dead farmers, ample bones that could have been used as a force for war or for farming instead, and farming equipment that doubled as ineffective and brittle weapons.

“Not one of them had a sword?” you ask, and Jerry reviews his evil notes with diligence. After a moment, he looks up with a shake of his head.

A wave of disgust hits you. You have been taking weeks, far more than enough time to at least equip the fringe cities for defense. Instead, your armies have invaded far too easily. While the peasants are now resting in their homes while the bones of their friends and family help to cultivate the fields and feed them, it should not have happened that easily.

That will change when the princess and her chosen one are on the throne.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!!!”

You turn to the hall, curious. “Jerry, I didn’t implement anything that should fill the hall with screams of abject terror, right?”

“No, your evilness,” Jerry responds. “Just the two o'clock screams of releasing stress and pent up energy to further fuel the aggressive magic of your armies.”

“I thought not,” you mutter, sweeping out of the war room to check on your minions. The screaming turns into gasps, and you break into a run.

Demon magic keeps you alive, sure, but it also comes with incredible physical benefits. Like being able to run from one side of the castle to the other in less than a moment.

“Gregory? Gregory! Ethan, can you turn it off?”

“I—! I—!”

“It hurts it hurts I can’t I’m sorry oh my hell let me die don’t do that to me oh hell—”

The room is chaos. The room is painful. The room is too bright.

There is a spell that covers an area in the inkiest night, washing all in pitch black and taking away sight and smell. You use it, and everything turns black.

“Maximus!” The three voices ring in relief, in sobs, in panic. You hear Gregory scramble to you first, and at this point he must be driven only by instinct.

It’s the same instinct that saved his life. The instinct to return home, to the holder of his contract. You accept him when he crashes into you.

“My lord,” he shudders, and you can feel him shake violently. “The light! The light!”

“I know,” you assure him, certain of what you saw with your own eyes. You look at Gregory’s eyes, wide and fearful, and cast a spell on them. Very quickly, his pupils, iris, and sclarea are covered in inky dark, and you can feel Gregory go boneless. “I will not let the light touch you again. Stay here.”

Sufficiently blinded to his fears—a temporary measure to provide some calm until he is truly out of the light’s reach—you adjust the darkness of the room.

The princess stands in the center of the room, her arms having dropped from where she was holding Gregory. She’s turned to you, and her face is both grim and determined.

You wonder if your manipulation is coming to fruition sooner than intended. If so, then at least the throne will be secured by an ally. That leaves…

Your eyes catch onto Ethan, and he’s standing on the other side of the room, his skin glowing with pure, unadulterated energy. You know from when you walked in that the darkness is dampening what would otherwise be a blinding light.

Even now, it makes you uncomfortable.

“I…” Ethan’s voice shakes, and past the glow, you can see him trembling just as much as Gregory.

Something more uncomfortable than Ethan having a natural inclination for light magic settles in your sternum. Or what’s left of it.

“I didn’t mean to…” he confesses, and the watery tone in his voice finally cracks. Now that Gregory is away from him, enshrouded in a safety of darkness, he seems to be realizing what, exactly, has happened. Ethan gasps for breath. “I didn’t mean to hurt him! What did I— What—”

The light pulses with Ethan’s panic, and you quickly disregard the notion that you’d have to darken his senses as well. It might hurt him, and you’re not in the business of needless torture.

You take a breath. Knowledge. Knowledge is what he needs right now.

“It’s a defensive spell,” you say, remembering what you learned all of those 200 years ago. Ethan, thankfully, seems to snap out of his downward spiral, looking at you.

Well, if he can look at you with such raw hope, then your manipulation must still be working. Thank the darkness.

“It’s also the first spell that demonstrates a person’s inclination towards light magic. The light wells up inside until it can no longer be contained, and it typically results in a soft glow. The longer a person holds their magic inside, the stronger the glow when it finally escapes.” You remember just how bright the room had been when you came in, and your stomach drops. “You must have been holding it inside for, perhaps months.”

You watch as Ethan gulps, and tears run down his face. He buries that face, that expression of loss and despair and regret, in his hands.

“I didn’t wanna hurt anyone,” he sobs, his shoulders shaking. “Light magic hurts people! It hid her majesty’s scars! It hurt you! I hurt Gregory!”

This image before you looks too familiar.

“I didn’t wanna hurt anyone!” Two hundred and eighteen years ago. A young magic user. Alone. “Dark magic hurts people! It tripped grandfather! It hurt you! I hurt—”

The similarities pain you more than the light itself could ever. You leaned into being evil. It was what you could do. You no longer care for the affirmation you never got.

But Ethan does. Ethan cares so, so much. It makes him malleable.

It makes him human. As you all are, at some point.

“Ethan,” you call, your voice commanding and velvet-soft. Enshrouded in darkness, used typically for sweetening deals, this is a call of comfort and a beckon to trust. Ethan falls into it with ease, weeks of having heard it preparing him to trust you. “I will not turn away from you for this. You cannot change what you are, as I cannot change what I am. Our magics will interfere with each other at times, and there are those uncomfortable with light magic, but it does not make you a different person.”

“Yes it does,” says Ethan, a mournful note in his first act of resistance. You might be proud if you weren’t so heartbroken by it. “I hurt Gregory.”

“Other light magic users hurt Gregory,” you correct, gently but firmly. “The memory of it pains him, and he can no longer be around light magic, but you have never lifted a hand against him, and you would never cause us harm because of our dark magic.”

“I’d never!” Ethan cries out, passionate as a burst of light tries to emphasize his words. It fluctuates with his emotions, and you know that he must be taught.

Like he should have been.

Those fools didn’t train him with a sword.

It figures they’d never teach him how to use his own magic either.

Fools.

“I know,” you say, “but now there is the matter of teaching you how to use light magic. I remember some lessons, but they are very old. I can teach you basic control, and after that…”

You know what it’s like to only be taught to control your gift instead of how to use it. However, for all of your power in darkness, light magic… it isn’t your specialty. Perhaps you could abduct a tutor for him, but how to ensure that this tutor wouldn’t undo all of your successful manipulation—

“I can take over from there.” The princess speaks up, and both you and Ethan turn to her. You raise an invisible eyebrow.

“The kingdom I ran from was filled with light magic users,” she points out, and you nod. It is most certainly true. “If I was going to lead them one day, I had to understand how the magic could be wielded and used. Since I don’t have light magic, they never taught me the foundations, only the flashy things that could be done by those who had the gift. If you can teach him control, I can teach him how to make it his own.”

“But…” Ethan pipes up, “what if I hurt someone else? What if I can’t do it? What if I don’t want to?”

And here is the crux of the matter. Self-rejection. The cruelest of enemies. More sinister than whatever lay in the dark. More cruel than whatever machinations the light may come up with.

Wicked.

However, you cannot force Ethan to love every aspect of his being, just as no one could do so for you.

“Then you will simply learn to control the light magic and no more,” you say. “The magic you have is a magic that is inherent to you. It is part of you, and you are now part of it. However, it does not own you. It is yours to choose what to do with. And if you choose to simply control it, then that is a choice you will be supported in.”

“And if you choose to use it, you’ll be supported there, too,” says the princess, and you nod. “There’s no bad magic, Ethan. There are only bad people, and you aren’t bad.”

Ah, the lesson you taught. It comforts your heart to see it used when it’s needed most.

It takes more convincing, and it takes much talking, but you believe, by the end of it, Ethan is reassured and ready. You rise to take Gregory away, ready to spend as long as you need to reassure him and provide what he needs to heal from the shock of seeing light magic in his own home, when another thought occurs to you.

This definitely explains why Ethan puked when he saw your face. Inherent light magic. Huh.

With a chuckle, you guide Gregory out of the room. It looks like your two allies are more powerful than you thought.

Twice in my youth (once in high school and once in college) I was in situations where I was asking someone out and I could tell they were calculating in their heads the risks of rejecting me, and both times I said, out loud, "you can say no, I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't prepared for either answer." And then they said no. This wasn't some spark of special wisdom I had - I knew to do it because feminist conversations among my age group brought it up regularly. This isn't happening nearly enough anymore.

More recently, I was really glad when we got to "rejection sensitive dysphoria" in my IOP program and it was one of those symptoms where the therapists really emphasized how it affects others. Because it does.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

If you're a teenager: you get to checkout and gosh. You can't pay. It's only $10 but you got grounded from your phone so you couldn't check the price and you only have six bucks on you. (Doing this will require you to have your phone put away well before checkout so they can't "teach you" how to do it.)

I remember an Expanded Universe comic set immediately after RotJ where Leia tells Luke words to the effect of "Vader literally had me tortured and blew up my homeworld. What, am I supposed to feel kinship with him just because I discovered he's my dad yesterday?"

The important thing that happens in Return of the Jedi is that the Emperor dies and the planet-killing superweapon gets blown up. Vader spent the last two hours of his life doing something good after 25 years of genocide, mass murder and torture, and even then, it was partly out of vengeful hatred. Vader fucking hated Palpatine for a quarter century and never had the spine to do anything about it. It was only after his own son was being tortured to death in front of him that he chose to act - and he'd cut off the kid's hand like two years before that! That's not a fucking redemption arc.

So one, yes, absolutely it is entirely correct to take issue with Darth Vader's apparent forgiveness by the Force, there is no need for Leia to accept him as her father or to feel anything for him besides hate and contempt, redemption takes more than turning back for a couple of hours and then getting out of culpability by dying, all fair.

That said: the original trilogy is Luke Skywalker's story and the story of Luke Skywalker, on a meta level, is about being a young adult in the 60s and 70s who did not experience WWII or the depths of fascism personally, but who grew up with gaping familial wounds - family members who you never knew but who older people refer to or talk around, people they compare you to, figures who other children had in their lives but you didn't. Someone who as a child was given fantasies of heroes fighting daring battles, who was told it was all about nationhood and fighting for your people and the course of civilization, someone who internalized those principles as guiding lights for their own morality and who they want to be... and THEN finding out when you become an adult, and are permitted to know about the horrors, that it is not just honor and glory in your heritage, that you, 70s white boy, may have evil and darkness and the corruption of all your values as a potential to fall into just as your father did, the temptation to hate and cruelty and domination and atrocity. And the absences in your family are maybe not just because of death, of noble sacrifice, but perhaps instead because those people who shared your blood became monsters, severed from their family because of their terrible actions, and still live as awful hateful versions of themselves, enslaved to evil, and that could be you.

And what do you do with that? Will you strike your father down with all of your hatred, when the thing that corrupted him by his hate for its own ends is sitting there grinning and laughing, waiting to do the same to you? Is violence the answer against that creature, infinitely better at taking advantage from violence than you are? Or will you just die - and even just walking away here means death, sooner or later - and let the evil persist?

Or will you, privileged young person with ideals and hopes, with a family member who has done terrible unforgivable things but who still holds affection for you, make use of that affection to tempt them to just turn their back on that evil for a moment, the thing it will never expect from the person it made its slave for longer than you've been alive? Neither you nor he can pay back the crimes of those years, but perhaps you can stop the evil, here and now, from going on.

So you do that. And what is your reward? Is it appropriate for Luke, whose whole story has been about becoming the ideal he grew up admiring and defeating the evil that ideal had the potential to become, both halves of it embodied in the being of his father, to come back to his friends and then have the universe say to him 'your father was unredeemable, and had nothing good enough in him to deserve peace in death'? Or to say there was a darkness lifted from him, and a light restored?

It doesn’t mean people will forgive you - hell no. The things Vader did were unforgivable, and he knew that. But because of that, he believed the only path left was to keep committing atrocities, to wallow in self-hatred and anger for decades and take it out on the galaxy. He says it himself: “It’s too late for me, son”.

But what Luke shows Vader is that we ALWAYS have a choice: To be a better person, and to choose compassion. Anakin doesn’t kill the Emperor out of hatred, or even because he thinks it’ll make up for anything he did: He knows nothing ever will. He chooses to save Luke, and break the cycle of violence because it’s the right, kind thing to do.

Vader/Anakin isn’t fully redeemed by the end of Return of the Jedi: He simply takes his first step back into the light. Obi-Wan and Yoda chose to give him that second chance, but that was their decision to make. The people you hurt are by NO means obligated to forgive you - but you should still strive to be better regardless.

And at the end of his life he took the terrifying step of freeing himself from it in a desperate effort to prevent a loved one from suffering. Should he have done that before? Absolutely. Could he have? I doubt it.

Few people---thankfully---are given the necessity of enduring their own failures at such a magnitude. It is NOT always easy to be good, and sometimes someone puts real effort into making it seemingly impossible. Humans often fail in that regard. Often.

But he saved the galaxy from the NEXT twenty years of the rule of the Sith, the absence of the Jedi, the overwhelm of the Empire, the destruction of more planets by the Death Star.

The fact he didn't save the galaxy from the FIRST twenty years of it doesn't erase that.

Leia doesn't have to forgive him, or see him as her father. But the message of Star Wars is, as stated above, that you're never too late to do better. Even, or perhaps especially, if you think it can never be enough.

Hell, sometimes the previous failure is what puts you in place to be a current success at it. Just as Han Solo's departure from the battle of Yavin let him enter the battle completely unexpectedly and land the hit that saved Luke from Vader in the trench run, Vader's presence as the Emperor's second-in-command and Sith apprentice, his loyalty to the Empire unimpeachable, put him in a position to successfully kill the Emperor---and, being the other Sith himself, to end their reign.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

Currently, it's marking season for us in the UK. I have an exam board in four hours, in fact, which is where we all go over every profile of every student on our courses, see what results they've achieved, and work out their "decision" - if all is well, the decision is to let them continue the course, or the final degree grade calculated if they're in final year. If it hasn't gone well, the decision is about whether they get to rework the pieces that failed, resit exams, repeat the whole year, or be required to withdraw.

And, as has been the case for the last two years, the profiles are now littered with plagiarism investigations. Every one of those - every single one - will have come in as an assignment that the lecturer received, and started reading, and then with a sinking feeling thought "This isn't your work." Every one had to go to an academic misconduct hearing. Every one is an enormous draw on time and resources, including the emotional reserves of the lecturer.

And I know that's not the main issue! I know in the grand scheme of things, our feelings aren't the most important part of this equation! But as we're talking about rudeness, let me explain:

Firstly, the work itself. You begin reading, you see it's AI. Contractually, we have to read it anyway, and give feedback on why it's shit, and what makes it bad, and that is absolutely fucking soul destroying. Most students who use AI are doing so because they've managed to train their brains to find reading something boring abhorrent, and they want to skip that part; but a ChatGPT-generated report is bland, vague, and utterly devoid of any passion, insight or personality. In short, it's boring. You simply passed your boredom on to us.

Secondly, regardless of your personal feelings about the assignment, it at least had a purpose. It was there to stretch you, and make you think about the topic so you could learn about it, and to test that learning so we can all make sure you have actually learned what you need to. But the slop you handed in, that I now have to mark? What's the point? Literally what is the fucking point of me marking it? You didn't even write it. None of the feedback I'm obligated to give means anything to you. I'm marking ChatGPT, and it can't read.

Which means, not only is it fucking boring, it's actively pointless. Ask anyone in the world what a boring but pointless obligatory task does to your mood. Imagine that.

Thirdly, the misconduct hearing. Because listen, again, the lecturer's feelings here are, once again, not the main point. Students who cheat like this aren't doing so because life is hunky dory. They're stressed and overwhelmed and struggling, and they think they've found a magic way out, and so being pulled into a misconduct hearing - where the best they can hope for is to have to redo the whole piece for a capped mark, on top of all the rest of the work they have (functionally, a bonus assignment), and the worst is expulsion - is a mental breakdown-inducing experience. That, obviously, is the biggest issue.

But, the lecturers know all that, which means we know what we're triggering if we do report it. I cannot tell you how upsetting it is to receive a slop assignment, realise what it is, and then have to make the call to report it. I know damn well how upsetting that's going to be for you. I know how stressful and painful that's going to be. I know this might mean you're going to be thrown out of university. In some cases, I know it means you will be.

I know I could look the other way to spare you that

And oh, that gets tempting. When things are really bad for you, and I see you struggling, and this is your third strike; fuck me but it's tempting to pretend that I can't tell.

I cannot do that.

Which brings me to number four: the soul-bleachingly fucking horrible ordeal that is the misconduct hearing itself. Most people are non-confrontational; I'm no exception. I also simply do not enjoy a sobbing, panicking student sitting in front of me, telling me about how stressed and scared they are and how they're terrified they're going to fail. But that's how these things go.

Our most recent example is an international Masters student. I don't know the particulars for him; but I do know it's not uncommon in his part of the world for families to go into obscene debt, often to loan sharks, to send their kids to UK universities. Failure means more than just academia for him. Having to sit through him turning white and quietly begging us to give him another chance before he left in tears he tried to hide from us was, obviously, much worse for him than us; but it was honestly traumatic. Even now, two weeks later, I can't get it out of my head. There's nothing we can do; but, I feel guilty anyway. I could have looked the other way.

(It wouldn't have passed anyway. It was terrible. But at least he'd probably be allowed a resit - we're still waiting on the outcome of this one, but he may well be withdrawn)

To bring this back to the point of the post: