Embrace Fiction-Induced Sadness

but halfway through he reveals that while researching he stumbled upon evidence that Light might be behind the Kira murders, and then spends like fourty minutes explaining the concept of a shinigami, an hour explaining how he thinks Light used one to commit murders, and then another hour explaining Light's ideology and why the concept of criminals being inherently evil is flawed

If watching this whole video hasn't changed your mind - made you *think* about the humanity of the people you are just callously sentencing to death - then I'm at a bit of a loss. But I do know one thing you don't:

My legal name.

That's right. Before I uploaded this video, I changed my legal name, and have encouraged those in my life to do so as well. Frankly, trying to decide what my new name would be probably pushed back this video's release like, a month.

(Aside: Actually it didn't but we can all just pretend it did, it's way more interesting than the minutiae of real issues that cropped up)

So. Is Light Yagami Kira? I can't say for sure. It turns out, accusing a public figure of serial murder comes with a lot of legal ramifications! You would think I'd have learned by now that talking about people has "potential consequences" like "being sued by extremely litigious individuals. "

I spent a long time thinking how to end this video. The only thing I came up with is that there's no way to judge a person by just a list of actions alone. And yes that includes Light, the wanker. Courts spend weeks and weeks trying to litigate criminal cases and they still get it wrong! So even though I think he may be the actual scum of the earth, I hope I'm wrong. I want to believe that, given the opportunity, he wouldn't take the ten seconds to write down my name and take my life with just a flick of his wrist.

*long beat*

But I still changed my name so don't even think about it you little sh-

(originally rambled on the SB discord)

so we know canonically kim's farsighted but there are some comments about him needing visual descriptions, struggling with both things nearby (footprints) and far away (the church through the binoculars)

when it's so all encompassing, it means the hyperopia has increased and it's often a symptom of glaucoma, which can get pretty bad if neglected. it makes me wonder how healthcare works under the Coalition govt, and if RCM officers have access to specialist medicine, honestly, the way Kim talks about funding and task distribution, it makes me think it's not actually common

i think the fact that he's literally depicted as composure, harry's awe at how cool kim is, even interactions where he pushes you to get your shit together paint the image of someone with a ridiculously high self control

arguably problematic, like someone who can't or doesn't know how to put down the walls and let anything in, or out

think that a young kim, understanding that his eyesight was getting worse, would seek refuge in that façade, refusing to relinquish control

plus of course, systemic racism, homophobia and juvie cop just adds to a delightful combo that ends with him being an absolute rock in the face of chaos

you can't let your guard down if you want to stay alive in Revachol, as it is

and life goes on, and his grasp on himself feels less and less protection and just How Things Are

the thing about glaucoma-induced sight loss, though, is that you don't notice it's happening

one day you just try to do something that you're so used to doing and you suddenly realize you can't, anymore

kim handles it, of course. there's no point in losing his shit over it. each year his prescription gets higher, his shooting scores get lower, and things fade out in the background. there's no time to mourn when you need to keep it together for the sake of your city.

he gets to martinaise expecting a run on the mill murder and comes out crumbling. harry as a miracle, the phasmid as a miracle, and the end of everything, also, in a way, a miracle. he gets home, concussed and exhausted and for the first time he allows himself to feel gratitude and loss. at least you got to see a giant stickbug. but it, too, shall pass.

omething shifts in him, maybe because when you are faced with the inevitable death of all you know and love, perhaps the only thing you can do is love while you can. it's not easy by any means, after 43 years of being a walking volumetric shit compressor.

i do think he ends up transferring to the 41st, and that when he says he likes the views better than in his GRIH office, he means it. he looks out of the window and he sees splotches of grey and orange every evening, hears bicycles zooming past. he misses seeing the buildings beyond a mass of concrete, but he feels the lives, he feels the kind hands of la Revacholière on his face and that is enough.

 sunsets are easy, but not everything is.

in october '52, he fills in his last crossword. he doesn't know it will be his last, until the next day he sits at the kitchen table, opens the paper and realizes he can't even see the grid. he mourns that, as he always does, retroactively.

53 brings the suspension of his driver's license. on the day he gets the news, before he has to go to a cobwebbed office to get the watermarked card cut up, he calls Harry. it's 5 in the morning, and he is tired, and he still comes running. they drive alongside the coastal highway, from Jamrock to Martinaise, thrash seeping out of the windows in the darkness of a very early morning. he thinks about asking Harry to help him push the Kineema into the waters of Martinaise. Then he thinks about pollution, about feeling so empty that you'd drive your car off of a waterlock, and he discards the fantasy. Harry doesn't say anything, for once. Kim holds out a hand, and he takes it. He thinks about getting used to this and almost passes out.

I'd like to think Jean and him bond over horses, over crass jokes and lack of balance and being in love with Harry, though neither say it out loud.

Jean teaches him how to ride, and Harry straps a small speaker to the saddle and they call the mare Coupris. Kim laughs for the first time, openly, in months. After a lifetime of being different, understanding, deep in your bones, that different can be inequivocally good does really change a man.

ther times it's harder to hold onto that thought, of course. There are harder things to mourn, despite it all. The violence and loneliness of orientation and mobility. Internalizing that a cane can only get you so far. The stares. The loss of independence. He endures this as penitence, some vestigial Dolorianismus.

Walking down the harbor and realizing that you are lost, that you are lost in what was your home and muscle memory can't save you, and you look for the cranes to tell you where the gate is and all you see is endles butane staring back.

He's in Harry's apartment one Friday night, leaning in and kissing Harry. The bucket list of the apocalypse, complete. Here you are, Kitsuragi, you are a blind, gay cop of Seolite descent and you are blissfully at peace with the end of the universe.

en you pull back, and things ache again. They always will. This certainty solidifies as you look ahead and desperately wish you could see Harry's face, but you can't. You can't see him aging, you can't see him loving and some nights you are aware that you are forgetting how he looks.

He wonders how an instant can hold so much tenderness and sorrow, and if that is what the Phasmid felt, a grief for all humanity.

Thankfully, it's a dull ache. Your city loves you, your partner loves you, and the world is no lesser for any other sense.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

One of the things I remember the most clearly is the oldest person in the group. Her name was Steelsong. She was a 40-something Dom with a sub whose name we knew even though we knew nothing else. She ran her own fanfic archive because the web was still handmade HTML and navigated in webrings and I’m pretty sure Google didn’t exist or was only barely, barely launched and not well known. She was kind and patient and we loved her. She treated everyone on the group with the respect given any adult, even though most of the rest of the world was still treating us like we were children. Not teenagers even, but children. She never once condescended to any of us, never made our youth a barrier to her respect, never treated us like we were incapable of being full people or like we were less than her because we were young.

I remember that she hosted our fanfiction, as absolutely terrible as it was (and I still have some of it, I am WELL aware of how cringingly terrible it is, just absolute nonsense garbage), right there alongside of other fic that was soul-achingly beautiful. Not a separate section for her friends or for kids, just right there like we were good enough to feature alongside other authors. I never once received crit from her that I didn’t ask for, only support. Only love. I am still writing today partly because Steel was so kind about our fic, fanfic and original.

I remember that when I started doing clay sculpture, she commissioned a tiny pair of dragons from me, to support me doing artwork. She sent a check my mom cashed for me, and my mom helped me mail it when it was finished. It broke in transit, and Steel assured me that she mended it and that it was still beautiful. It was a small gold dragon curled up with a small silver dragon.

I remember that her patience knew no bounds. I remember that she was there for us, regardless of reason. When we wanted to know silly things like what to do with a single AA battery, she answered. When we had serious questions about sex, she answered.  When we had questions about writing, she taught us. When one of our group members, a young gay teen in Australia, ended up in the hospital and then stopped making posts, and we all knew what had happened, she let us talk to her about it because we couldn’t go to our own parents, even though we had just lost a friend.

She was not a replacement to my parents, but she was an extra parent, in some ways. A friend, certainly, but someone that had been through more life than we had and was willing to pass on knowledge if we asked for it. Someone older that we trusted with things that were too uncomfortable to go to our parents or teachers or whatever about, because we already knew she wasn’t going to judge us or something, and that we would get an honest answer.

I don’t know why I’m remembering this so hard tonight, and I’m not sure if there’s a point to sharing this, except that I know she’s gone now. She was ill the last time we spoke, and her site went down a long time ago, and I miss her. She was a huge influence on my life, then and now. She was hope, for me, that life as an adult didn’t have to be boring, it wouldn’t have to mean giving up the things I loved and Becoming Only Responsible With No Fun. Her presence meant I had hope I could still write and play with friends even when I wasn’t ‘a kid’ anymore. And she’s gone, and I miss her, and I wanted to share her from the perspective of youth, and the perspective over twenty years later has provided me.

And I think of her, when people go off about older folks being in fandom with younger folks. I’m an older folks now, or at least middle aged folks because there are certainly folks older than me still, but I wasn’t always. I’ve been here since i was a younger folks, and I know how much Steel’s presence and support meant to me, how much she helped not just me but everyone on that group. And I think of the people saying older folks don’t belong in fandom, and that they shouldn’t interact with younger folks at all, and I just think… I can’t agree. I needed that kind of solid presence in my life back then and even at the age I am now, I need the folks older than me to stay. I want them here.