Not My Circus, Not My Monkey

Witch Hats / Hair Pins

Costurero Real on Etsy

The leather binds she had awoken in after being grabbed off the street by cloak covered cultists bit firmly into her arms, legs, chest and neck as they wrapped across her body.

Although she could not move her head, she could tell she was laying on a cold stone platform. The chill sunk deep into her bones through the silk negligee she found herself in.

She wasn't sure how many cultists there were, but she could hear a dull chanting from every direction.

"Good things come to those who wait. Better prizes for those who act in haste!" They repeated over and over in a quiet murmur.

Suddenly silence fell over the chanters and the only sound in the room was the pattering of a single person's footsteps approaching her.

A man in an ornately decorated cloak, with sigils sewn around the hood in bright red thread appeared above her. The same sigils were tattooed all over his arm as it reached out to lay a blood red stone on her chest.

"For thirty years we have heard nothing from The Insidious One." He spoke, addressing what she assumed was a crowd.

"For thirty long years we have paid tribute, only to be met with silence! The elders preached to us that we must wait. That we must worship an absent god. But today the elders are gone! Today we reclaim our fate! Today, we summon Terasq!"

The room exploded in cheers.

"A cult who usurped their own cult" Terra thought to herself. "Just my fucking luck."

The man who appeared to be the leader removed a large dagger from his cloak, holding it aloft.

"That's ornamental right? Like an athame? Because listen the kidnapping charges won't be so bad if you don't hurt me, and I'm sure your god doesn't want to get caught up in legal issu"

The Insidious Priest paid no attention to her words, bringing the dagger down and slicing the strange sigils into her flesh.

She screamed trying desperately to wriggle free from her binds to no avail. And just when total panic was about to consume her, something strange happened.

The pain from the cuts disappeared. She couldn't feel them. She couldn't feel her own body at all. Her senses were suddenly ripped out of this constricting third dimension.

Instead she could feel the pulse of trillions of different potential futures, sprawling out into trillions of different pasts.

All visible. All simultaneous. She could see, not just this world, but every world.

Every planet, every society, every creature who had ever invoked her name played out their infinite iterations inside her head.

She could feel their prayers. Their tributes. Their bonds as they offered up their souls to her.

With an effortless motion she stood from the platform, her binds shredding like paper. She caught the red stone as it tumbled towards the ground and shattered it inside her fist.

The cultists, such ignorant fools, so in love with their rituals they no longer understood what they represented, just screamed.

The head Priest, assuming the ritual had gone wrong, lashed out with his dagger. She caught him by the wrist, breaking his bones as the dagger clattered to the platform below.

"In the name of Terasq, I hex thee!" The man shrieked pathetically.

She laughed, flicking her arm and hurling his body into the crowd of remaining cultists who hadn't fled immediately.

"I take one tiny vacation and you petulant fucks start kidnapping girls in the night? You disgust me. You were lucky to have only gotten silence, but you forsook that blessing, and now you will get what you've asked for."

The News reported later about a collapsed cave on the outskirts of town. The anchor mentioned the victims were suspected of "occult dealings" and authorities assumed that they caused a cave in doing unlicensed excavation.

∴╎ꖎꖎ ʖᒷ ᓭ𝙹ᒲᒷ𝙹リᒷ ℸ ̣⍑ᔑℸ

̣ ∴╎ꖎꖎ ⍑ᔑ⍊ᒷ ||𝙹⚍∷ ʖᔑᓵꖌ

On-Going Project. Folders were empty.

Well Written Articles, 1999. There were no articles in this folder. There were a lot of budget reports though.

Stuff. You are killing me smalls.

Miscellaneous Old Stuff. *long sigh*

Other Idiocy. Honestly, this one was fitting.

(R) Man Claws. I have so many questions. Like, SO many

Keep for historical reasons. Neat.

Okay so I guess I need to say this again but I’ll try to dumb it down this time so y’all get it.

Do I find women (or just people in general) being sex trafficked hot? Obviously not, I’m not a fucking psychopath. Which is why in the fic that I posted, I explained that I did my best to keep the focus on reader and not mention anyone else but I had to a little bit for the ‘plot’.

However… Do I think the fantasy of Jackson Rippner (a FICTIONAL CHARACTER) buying ME as a slave and breeding me without my consent is hot? Yes.

Now I want you to read that again slowly so you really get it, but I’ll help you out in case you still don’t understand:

1) it’s FANTASY. Even if it was Jackson Rippner in real life, would I want to be bought as a slave and forcefully bred?? No… wtf

2) it is about ME. I exclusively write reader insert fanfiction about myself, but I keep it vague enough so that other readers can put themselves in the story as well. I don’t fantasize about women being sex trafficked and sold as sex slaves because you’re right, that is awful and not at all hot.

Lastly I’d like to point out something important that I’ve mentioned before. My work is not harming anyone. This is not like visual porn where creating this content exacerbates the issue…

Why do we say that capitalism must be “dismantled”?

You’ll hear phrases like “Smash the state!” “Eat the rich!” and “Smash capitalism!”

And, yes, of course, but… :)

However relevant those sayings are, our work must be careful, highly organized and above all planned.

Because capitalism and all of its associated systems are not discrete, abstracted entities we can attack independently.

It is a structure, like a complicated machine with many thousands of working parts…

And right now it is connected to absolutely everything.

If we do this… [picks up huge hammer and smashes the machine]

Then a lot of vulnerable people will die.

The machine was built and improved and redesigned and patched over the course of generations. It is very good at its intended purpose, which is ultimately to generate profit.

Every human being alive today relies on the byproducts of the machine to survive, without exception.

The machine’s engineers want it to keep working like it does. In fact, they want to optimise it.

That will kill all remaining life on Earth.

So, we must destroy the machine, quickly and carefully

We must examine its deadly programs and mechanics and replace them with alternatives we built together.

The engineers don’t want us tampering with the machine.

However, we make it run…

So we can make it STOP. Together.

How will YOU help us to safely dismantle the machine?

iww.org

Because Rainbow Fish can be retold like this: 

A fish has a part of their body - their physical, incarnate body, what they were born with - that makes them very happy and that they are very proud of. They also have an unfortunate habit of thinking that they are better than other fish. That part isn’t good, and causes the other fish to be unhappy with them and avoid them. 

The fish is now very sad. The only person who likes the fish anymore tells him to go to the octopus, the animal framed as the adult in the story. 

The octopus tells the rainbow fish that they have been a snotty jerk and that the only way to make people like them again is to take off their scales and give them away. That in order to have any friends and make up for their behaviour, they have to rip off pieces of their own body and self and give them away to other people to make the other people happy and make up for their transgressions. 

And the rainbow fish is upset. And then another fish comes and asks them for a scale. And the rainbow fish takes off a piece of themself, their body, the thing they were born into, and gives it away. And now that fish likes him, and is materially benefitted by this piece of another fish’s actual body that has been given to it. 

And then the other fish come, and the rainbow fish rips off more parts of its body - all of the parts that used to make it happy and that it was proud of - and gives them to the other fish, because it’s not fair that the rainbow fish’s body was so much nicer. And when the rainbow fish has ripped all but one scale off, tearing out of themself all but one of the things that they possessed in their self that made them happy, then all the fish are friends with them! And everything is great! And everyone has a fair share. 

Of the rainbow fish’s, and I do quite mean to keep hammering this point, own body.

What the book says is: 

1. if you are born with something nice - like, for instance, an attractive body or a clever mind or a talent or whatever - and it makes you happy and proud, you are a horrible person and deserve to be shunned. Absolutely no line is ever drawn between Rainbow Fish’s self, their actual own body, and their behaviour. In reality, it’s their behaviour that’s the problem: they are mean and aloof to the other fish. This could be the case whether or not their body was all covered with magnificent scales. However, the book absolutely conflates the two: their behaviour is framed as a natural and unavoidable outcome of being happy about and proud of their special, beautiful body. So don’t you dare ever be happy or proud of anything you have or can do that everyone else doesn’t have exactly the same amount as, because if you do, you are horrible and by definition snotty, stuck up and mean. 

2. That in order to make up for the transgression of having something about your actual self that makes you happy and proud (which, remember, has automatically made you selfish and snobby, because that’s what happens), you must rip pieces of what makes you happy out of yourself and give them to other people for the asking, and you must never ever EVER have more of that part of - again, I hate to belabour except I don’t - your self than other people have, and that makes you a good person that people like and who deserves friends. 

To summarize, then: to be a good person you must never have something about yourself that makes you happy and proud and if you happen to be born with that something you must absolutely find a way to give it away to other people and remove it from yourself, right up to tearing off pieces of your body, in order to be a good person who deserves friends. 

This, I am absolutely sure, is not what the author intended: the author definitely meant it to be a story about sharing versus not sharing. But the author then used, as their allegory/metaphor, the fish’s own actual body. Their self. It was not about sharing shiny rocks that the rainbow fish had gathered up for himself. It wasn’t even about the fish teaching other fish how to do something, or where to find something. 

The metaphor/allegory used is the fish’s literal. body. And so the message is: other people have rights to you. Other people have the right to demand you, yourself, your body, pieces of you, in a way that makes absolutely sure that you have no more of anything about your body and self that is considered “good” than they do. 

And that might just suck a little bit except, hah, so: Gifted adult, here. Identified as a Gifted child. 

This is what Gifted children are told, constantly. All the fucking time. 

(Okay, I overstate. I am sure - at least I fucking HOPE - that particularly by this time there are Gifted children coming to adulthood who did not run into this pathology over and over and over and over again. I haven’t met any of them, though, and I have met a lot of Gifted adults who were identified as Gifted as children.) 

Instead of being told what’s actually a problem with our behaviour (that we’re being mean, or controlling, or putting other people down), or - heavens forfend - the other children being told that us being better at something doesn’t actually mean moral superiority and is totally okay and not something we should be attacked for, we are told: they’re jealous of you. That’s the problem. 

Instead of being taught any way to be happy about our accomplishments and talents that does not also stop the talents and accomplishments of other children - whatever those are! - from being celebrated, we are left with two choices: to be pleased with what we can do, or what we are, or to never, ever make anyone feel bad by being able to do things they can’t. And the first option also comes with two options: either you really ARE superior to them because you have skills, abilities and talents they don’t (or are prettier), or you are a HORRIBLE stuck up monster for feeling that way. 

(It is not uncommon for Gifted kids to chose either side, which means it’s not uncommon for them to choose “okay fine I really AM better than you”; this can often be summarized as “intent on sticking their noses in the air because everyone else is intent on rubbing them in the dirt”; on the other hand I have met a lot of Gifted women, particularly*, who cannot actually contemplate the idea of being Gifted because to do so is to immediately imply that they are somehow of more moral or human worth than someone else and this means they are HORRIBLE HORRIBLE SELFISH PEOPLE, and so will find literally any reason at all that their accomplishments are not accomplishments or that they don’t deserve anything for them.) 

Instead of being given any kind of autonomy or ownership of ourselves, we are loaded down by other people’s expectations: we are told that because we can accomplish more we must, and that daring not to do what other people want to the extent that they want with what we are capable of we are selfish, slackers, lazy, whatever. We are taught that we owe other people - our parents, our friends, even The World - excellence, the very best we can possibly do, and trust me when I say people are ALWAYS insisting We Could Do Better. And we should, or else we will be disappointing them, or letting them down, because (because we are Gifted) the only reason we could possibly be failing is not trying hard enough. 

We are, in fact, told over and over and over and over again, to rip off pieces of ourselves to give to other people to make them happy, because those pieces are valuable, but forbidden from enjoying the value of those pieces - pieces of our selves - for our own sake because that would be selfish and arrogant. And we owe this, because we were born a particular way. 

Because, metaphorically, we were born with rainbow scales, so now we have to rip off those rainbow scales in the name of Sharing, and otherwise we are selfish and horrible and deserve to be alone.** 

That is why I fucking hate The Rainbow Fish. 

Because whatever the author INTENDED, the metaphor they chose, the allegory they picked, means that THAT is the story they actually told. (And is the story that child after child after child after child I have encountered actually takes from it.) I don’t hate the author; I’m not even mad at them. But I do hate the book with a fiery passion, and it is among the books I will literally rip apart rather than allow in my house when I have kids, because I’m not going to give it to anyone ELSE’s kid either. 

*but, I would like to note, not UNIQUELY: this is something I encounter in Gifted men as well. 

**I can’t remember who it was, in relation to this, put forward the thought: if people actually talked about the access and use of children’s bodies the way we talk about access to and use of Gifted children’s minds and talents†, the abusiveness would be absolutely clear? But they’re right.