Love that buton with the funny arrows

What a red flag actually means: something here is an indicator of a potential problem (but might be fine with a reasonable explanation)

What people have now decided it means: abuse

I've lost count of the number of times I've now had to read variants of "My partner takes all my money and gives me back an allowance because he says it's a man's job to control finances, but he's racking up gambling debts" being met with "Wow this man is a walking red flag" no Becky that is abuse. That is not an indicator. He is an abuser. Call the police. We have lost the concept of a proxy: a thing that indicates a more important thing. And it's relevant to this conversation because I'm actually going to go out on a limb here:

With the obvious exception of paedophilia, age gaps themselves aren't a problem at all - they are a proxy for the actual harmful phenomenon. Hea me out, let me explain

The reason we don't like age gaps is because of the implied power dynamic. If one partner, usually male, is older than other - particularly if the other is still quite young - the risk is that what we're seeing is a worldly wise predator who is exploiting the lack of life experience of a young beautiful woman by mentally abusing her until she's no longer young and pretty enough to satisfy, at which point he'll move on to the next. There have been enough examples of this in human history. It's unfortunately not an uncommon pattern. Genders can also be diverse in this scenario

We can't necessarily see that dynamic from the outside. But we CAN see an inherent element of it: the ages of the people involved. So age becomes a proxy for the abuse. And, hey, it's often correct.

But here's the thing: the ages themselves are not causing harm.

The power dynamic is. The abuse is.

Plenty of age gap relationships are loving, healthy and steadfast. Two people met and genuinely fell in love regardless of the outer packaging, and have a relationship with all the highs and lows and challenges and rewards as any more traditional pairing. This happens all the time

Is the age gap a red flag? Sure! It indicates a potential issue.

Is it inherently abusive? Absolutely fucking not.

OP is right - we need to stop focusing just on the numbers and twisting the facts to fit by infantilising the younger partners, and start focusing on the actual harms. The DiCaprio Pattern of only dating under 24s repeatedly is itself a proxy, too, actually - but a much stronger one than the simple presence of an age gap.

(Even so, in DiCaprio's case, until any of his former partners come forward and describe him as abusive, actually, even that is up in the air - my personal interpretation, given how strong a pattern it is, is that he's a loser who views women as trophies (consciously or not). If any have come forward and I don't know about it, of course, fair enough. But those women were adults capable of making their own decisions, even if they might later come to regret it. And regretting poor decisions is part of life! That's how it goes, particularly with relationships. As long as they weren't abused, there's no biggie. And just as he was looking for young-and-beautiful, there's no way they weren't, on some level, looking for rich-and-famous; it goes both ways.)

Also, another element of this: I think a lot of modern extreme puritan discourse on this is actually ironically down to the age of those taking part. Up until your late 20s, ten years is actually a huge span of time to you, because in your own life you were in a completely different developmental phase ten years ago (teenager), and a completely different phase again ten years before that (child). That skews your sense of what a ten-year gap means. Whereas once you're in your 30s and beyond, ten years is like. Yeah I was an adult ten years ago, and I still am now. That's two adults. Who cares.

Witch Hat Atelier Manga Spoilers!

Thinking about Qifrey discribing the ink from the Silverwood tree as it's 'literal blood' and brushbuddies looove ink!

Nigel Farage is the leader of Reform UK, a far right party who are currently in the process of a serious bid to become the UK government. they are just straight up evil.

Count Binface is an intergalactic space warrior with a bin on his head. he likes to run as a novelty candidate in general and mayoral elections. a big thing he likes to do is run as a candidate against the incumbent prime minister:

(Also pictured: Boris Johnson, Elmo)

Anyway, in brief:

Nigel Farage is currently in the midst of a big scandal about his finances

He has decided to deal with this by 1) making a show of nobly resigning from parliament and then 2) immediately running in the resulting by-election

He has stated that he is letting 'the people' judge his actions and implied that if he wins that will prove that he has been exonerated in the court of public opinion

His goal was presumably to get a big resounding win over the other parties, proving that The People still love him.

the other parties have thus far decided that this is a 'vanity election' and, well, there is one very easy way to ensure that he will not beat any of them, and that is simply not to play.

and as a result the only person who has so far confirmed they are running against him is Count Binface. no matter the outcome this makes Nigel Farage look like, u know, a fucking clown.

"oh, that's easy! it's because they're fundamentally Bad people who want to hurt others and choose their beliefs to justify that! :) hope this helps"

or

"they just don't have access to the same information we do. look at this person who was raised in a cult! don't you feel sorry for her?"

and like, yes, fine, some people were in fact raised in cults, but what i wish people would understand is that the bulk of it is just normal human flaws, like:

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel smart and cool and like they've figured everything out (you also do this)

they want to believe stuff that makes them feel like their emotions are justified and grounded in reality, and that the people they want to hurt deserve to be hurt (you also do this)

they form conclusions before they've processed all the relevant information, and cling to that first impression even when new info comes to light (you also do this)

they pick up beliefs from the people around them because they want to be liked and fit in, not because the beliefs are good or true (you also do this)

they come up with reasons that the stuff that benefits them (and the people they like and identify with) is actually overwhelmingly best for everyone and obviously the right thing to do (you also do this)

they pay more attention to stuff that supports what they already believe and avoid looking in places that might show them otherwise (you also do this)

they listen to people who talk like 'one of them' and ignore others (you also do this)

they come up with reasons to dismiss people with conflicting viewpoints as obviously in bad faith or ignorant or a shill or evil (you also do this)

they fail to take their own beliefs seriously sometimes, and take their beliefs way too seriously other times, in a selective way that lets them do the things they already wanted to do (you also do this)

the very ways they construct the ideas of 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' and 'belief' and 'understanding' are biased so that what they don't want to believe comes under lots of scrutiny and what they do want to believe receives less (you also do this)

you, dear reader, are presumably right about everything and were correct to die on every hill you've ever died on, but the difference between you and someone who's wrong about important stuff doesn't look like "well they're inherently evil and i'm not", it probably looks like a combination of:

natural environment (they would have been exposed to different information than you regardless of their choices)

being in the right place at the right time (your particular profile of flaws and virtues happened to be what was needed to lead you to the right conclusions, they had the opposite experience)

random luck (you doubled down on what felt right to believe but wasn't, but it turned out to be inconsequential, or even right for different reasons, while they doubled down on what turned out to be a horrible mistake distorting their entire worldview)

you do less of the things in the previous list, and over time the difference between you and them adds up

and, look, i also do these things. the nicest and most thoughtful people i've ever met do these things. if you meet someone who never does any of these things, i dunno, give them a fucking medal or something.

what the fuck was john, necromantically speaking

i don’t mean after the genocide/resurrection thing. we have plenty of theories about what he is then (i personally favor the theory that he’s a new and exciting kind of resurrection beast).

BUT. before that, but after he gains necromancy, he should just be a normal necromancer, right? but instead there’s a bunch a weird shit:

1. he isn’t frail? like necromancers are canonically pretty physically weak and sickly. but john mentions no illnesses or new limitations (there’s an argument to be had about his mental state, but that can easily be attributed to the Everything Burning Down)

2. doesn’t eat?? PLEASE correct me if i’m wrong, but i believe that john stops eating food while back on earth and he’s fine (for a given definition of the word). afaik, necromancers still need to eat, right? canaan house served kind of shitty meals that the necromancers still ate. why would they eat plain leaves if they didn’t have to? sooooo why could john starve himself without actually starving?

3. is more powerful that most necromancers??? at some point, john drops 100 people in a kilometer radius, and he can pinpoint the ones with guns. if adepts can do that, why aren’t the battles against boe and the rest being won much faster? if that level of power is - we’ll say slightly above average, for the sake of argument, then the normal necromancers are really not up to par.

the thing is, we know necromancy has a genetic component to it. it is possible to alter dna to make an extra strong necromancer (hi, harrow). john’s eyes turned gold when his necromancy kicked in and his daughter inherited them, as well as a portion of his unkillability, indicating they were at least partly genetic traits.

A soul is the best battery there is, and having total access to one is what makes Lyctors so much more powerful than a regular necromancer and means the toll for their "magic" does not go to their bodies. (I'll also like to add that Lyctor's apparent lack of "necromantic recoil" could be because they just heal super fast.) 

In John's case, he was connected to a planet's soul, which would be the greatest source of energy we have seen until now, so his limit is extremely high (but as far as we have seen, it does exist, he can't just do whatever he wants), and his regeneration is also almost limitless. 

He does seem to have an adverse effect (or to have had it before killing the planet) since Harrow lumps him with Augustine and Mercy as having a more typical necromantic look in comparison with Gideon I, but that could also be because he was being influenced by a non-human soul to have weird habits that were detrimental to his health (like how Nona acts). As for why that did not kill him, my best bet is that being connected to the Earth's energy let him keep his body functioning via magic.

Also, necromancy is pretty much not genetic but does seem to be soul-based (it is said that there is no biological difference between necromancers and non-necromancers except for greater activity from vestigial organs), but being conceived in the wake of a mass death (so, a place supercharged with thanergy) would seem to be able to skyrocket the chances of a soul being "in tune" with thanergy and therefore the baby being a necromancer. Gideon does not only have John/Alecto's golden eyes but also their regenerative abilities (or at least regeneration on par with a Lyctor), so she is probably (somehow) also connected to the Earth's soul, and that is how she gets both of those things.

What John is, pre-res, is actually pretty horrifying.

He's a regular human being, and something about him catches the attention of a vast and ancient entity entirely beyond human comprehension and communication. It picks up in some way that he is trying to help it, even though he does not understand that the thing he is trying to help isn't just a biosphere but a conscious, ensouled entity, albeit on a scale so vastly more complex than a human that they are scarcely comparable. It wants to help him to help it. They will both live to regret it.

This entity modifies him on a genetic level without his knowledge or consent - and we still don't know the extent of that. What can Gideon's abilities tell us about John pre-res, and how might they be relevant in ATN?

It's hard to say at what stage John not sleeping or eating went from a symptom of his mania to something preternatural. Maybe it was always both. He's certainly latterly manually tweaking biochemical processes to skip sleep and meals. What's not entirely clear is whether he's describing a situation where there's something else sustaining him, or if it's more akin to Harrow's experience on the Mithraeum and he is running on reserves he can't spare. Or whether the framework laid onto him by an entity so different to him has complicated these things for him - after all, even experiencing human bodily needs doesn't make Nona like eating.

Pre-res, he's operating at a level beyond the necromancers he created, but within a recognisable framework of energy exchange. : he kills those 100 people using the thanergy from five accidental deaths, and in GTN Harrow says "Give me a single death and I can go for ten minutes". But we don't know much of the broader mechanics of his abilities - just the aspects that he comes to identify as 'necromancy'.

John has been Changed and has no frame of reference for how or why. But he is working closely with cadavers, and much of his work will have involved the liminality of life and dormancy and death. So that's where his terrifying new senses take him. To the cadavers, to the workings of bodies, to what makes someone alive or not. But we know he had other abilities, and that he was aware of them: C- talks about the idea of him stabilising a glacier or manipulating the atmosphere. Later, we see him commanding water and earth.

The sleep had been a steady decline. In the beginning he was "sleeping like a baby", even in his state of hyperfocus where he was working long hours and having "five breakthroughs a day" (obviously hyperbole but still very zoned in and understanding more than he ever had). The first time he made the corpses move, he hadn't slept for two days and was laughing from delirium. Over the time where he'd started healing everyone who came to him (until the nun came and told him "buddy if you don't stop playing Jesus they're going to crucify you like Jesus" and got him to wrap it up prettier for capitalism), his friends had to force him to take breaks for food and sleep. And by the end he's stopped entirely.

John 8:1 also talks about how he's never liked sleeping, never liked 'losing control'—though it's unclear if "never" is literal or just in the time Alecto has truly known him—but he can be coaxed into it while Alecto is there keeping guard ... exactly like how Nona only falls asleep in the classroom only because Hot Sauce is there keeping watch. ;-;

But one the other side? Stopped sleeping is as opposed to "wasn't eating much" ... and then in the same chapter, he cries at the wedding not because of the service but because "I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten food." And yeah you can just read it as a contradiction, but man it's weird to specify food, and then looking at Nona... Yeah I absolutely think he was also being compelled to eat pencils and erasers and sand. Shoveling dirt into his mouth while trying to eat her soul doesn't require that part but it doesn't exactly hurt the read either.

—

And then, regarding genetics and the nature of necromancy!

Like @just-a-river said, necromancy isn't genetic. There's the slightly higher activity in vestigial organs, and also their nervous system is attuned for thanergy; the latter obscure detail from A Sermon On Cavaliers And Necromancers seems to be both why they can sense and work with thanergy and thalergy and the reason they're so sickly even when they don't use their aptitude, but especially the more that they do. So there's a certain degree of biological effect, but it doesn't pass down genetically. Two necros can have kids without aptitude, two people with no aptitude and none for generations can have a necro.

But specifically, necromancers don't reproduce outside the Nine Houses; they can't be born anywhere else. And the Nine Houses are uniquely thanergenic—not just thanergetic, not just dead, but actively producing thanergy. That's why outside the system, they need so many ground troops and a fresh death to go ten minutes, but within the system Harrow can raise small armies to beat up her childhood nemesis just to be a dick. So it does seem like it's a matter of the environment they're born in (and if John's numbers and projections with the 500 newly Ninth are an accurate reflection of the empire as a whole, it's roughly 1 in 3 people that's randomly born with aptitude).

(Tangentially! When a planet is flipped, whatever wildlife is left become thanergy mutants, incapable of reproduction. So. I do wonder if that's technically exactly what necromancers are, too? And if those mutants can similarly reproduce, if with difficulty, on thanergenic planets. That would certainly explain there still being fish left for the skeletons to fish up on the First.)

Which is all to say:

Yeah gold-eyed John in the last year pre-Resurrection absolutely isn't a necromancer. On top of C—'s urging and all of the massive healing we see him doing, there's also the tooth bouquet. Which, yeah, had teeth apparently aweiaojwoe, but was also plant matter he created or at the very least grew out of something, even before he became God. His power isn't limited to humans or even to things with meat. And of course yeah we directly see him manipulating earth and water and loooooooots of evidence he has a significant amount of control over Time after he becomes God.)

Which also means it stands to reason he wouldn't have a thanergetic nervous system, not like others do. But he does look like a typical necro, by Harrow's account, and I feel like the easiest explanation for that is just: rapid cell renewal begins at the point of Lyctoral absorption. This is just how bad he looked after one year as her vessel.

And if it's not genetic...

Every single other instance of eyes changing in this series has been indicative of souls. Moreover, John and Alecto explicitly share a soul NOW, so there has to be Something going on for their eyes not to be the same. I have multiple theories, possibly together or possibly independently, there, but for the purposes of this it's enough to say, they should be the same. This on its own is evidence against the idea that their eyes ever swapped, especially seeing as he didn't have any secret method to preserve her, she was just too big to eat or to hold their fully fused soul inside himself. And if she didn't re-code his genetics for gold eyes—eyes SO unnaturally, inhumanly bright gold that THREE people who have lived 10,000 years took one look at them and immediately knew they could belong to no one else in the universe—then the conclusion becomes, yeah, this eye change was ALSO a matter of souls. This is Earth overlaying him, or running through him like an undercurrent.

(And of course like Katakaluptastrophy said! Completely without his consent and without any kind of explanation. The closest thing he ever gets to a singular instruction is her first passive miracle through him being the corpses he'd loved most failing to rot. Of course that's the path he pursues to discover more. If she'd picked literally anything else, how different might things have been? But then, why would she have ever picked anything else, when she was only ever afraid to die? 😔)

—

And John and Nona's stories and powers are very parallel!

Now that we have discussed this: I would like you to imagine the first time after Rocky left for Tau Ceti that somebody has the gall to speak of Adrian and Not refer to them as “Rocky’s Adrian” when the context would make that the appropriate way to refer to them. Implying they’re available now.

Wacom recently asked me to talk about why I make queer comics, and given there are multiple bills right now floating around in congress that are effectively "we will kill your livelihood if we get a sniff of queer" I had some pretty strong, simply feelings to relay.

it just makes real that human feeling of like, something HAPPENED here. it can't just be THIS, can it??? it has to be SOMETHING --