Whump, Hurt/Comfort, and Shitposts about Whump and Hurt/Comfort | Mix of canon characters, fandom OCs, and OCs. I am "Ihc" on AO3 and "IHCFanfic" on Reddit and Deviantart. WARNING: This blog contains PG-13/T rated suggestive content/humor and R/M rated violent content / profanity, I make no guarantee that everything will be tagged. Browse at your own risk / discretion. Kink blogs DNI please.
Just reread Fugitive Telemetry and upon a reread I think Murderbot is a tiny bit misinterpreting Senior Officer Indah's behavior towards it. Murderbot thinks it's because it's a SecUnit, which is obviously not wrong, but I think there's another facet of this which isn't on Murderbot's radar: once Indah starts thinking of it as a person, she's probably thinking of it as This Arrogant Asshole From the Corporation Rim who thinks Preservation Security are a bunch of incompetent hippies, tells them how to do their jobs and keeps complaining about them not having the dystopian levels of mass surveillance that it's come to expect from working in the CR, and is upset that they said no to giving it access to a bunch of data that violates privacy laws.
I can see how, from the perspective of a cop who has grown up in Preservation culture, this must be incredibly annoying, and means even setting aside any prejudices over a SecUnit being a deadly weapon, it kind of comes across to Indah as someone who she can't trust to follow basic standards of professional ethics if it thinks it knows better.
And Murderbot doesn't really consider this as a possibility because it's not used to being seen as a person at all, let alone seen as one by the Corporation Rim, so the idea that someone else would see it as a Corporate Person just never crosses its mind.
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Fugitive Telemetry really front loads you with a lot of juicy characterization for Murderbot that I’m only fully catching onto on my third reading, but now that I’m paying attention it’s lighting up like fireworks. The stakes here aren’t as high as something like Network Effect, so the characters really come into focus. This might be a multi part post while I get my thoughts written out
Okay so the drones. Mensah gets MB two boxes of intel drones after a press leak reveals its presence on Preservation to the public. Senior Officer Indah thinks it was to get back at her for presumably being the source of that leak; giving drones to the rogue SecUnit (the one her security team vehemently opposed even allowing on the station) was Mensah’s way of telling her to fuck off. MB thinks the drones were a pre-conceived bribe from Mensah in exchange for MB keeping quiet about the fact that she hadn’t gone to trauma treatment yet, and that this was why she already had the drones on hand when the press release happened. That’s all textual, and MB goes on to say, “[Indah] wasn’t wrong. Mensah’s really smart. She can sort of bribe me and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.”
But the implicit belief MB is operating on in both cases is that Mensah’s stated explanation for giving it the drones is not true. What was that explanation again?
“Mensah told [Indah] that it was a medical issue. That I needed them to fully interact with my environment and communicate.”
I think it says a lot that MB immediately discards this as a lie. MB is still fairly new to thinking of itself as a person at all, let alone what it means to be a person on Preservation. When has anyone ever cared about accommodating its needs? When has it ever had a chance to think of itself as a person in need of accommodations? We know (because MB knows) that MB feels more comfortable and secure when it has access to sec systems and camera feeds. But it doesn’t seem aware that its comfort is a high enough priority to be… well, a priority. This is a medical issue; MB does need some amount of external system awareness to fully interact with its environment and communicate.
To put it plainly, it sounds very similar to accommodations for autism. MB needs a higher level of sensory input to feel at ease, and it explicitly needs tools that allow it to avoid eye contact. It interacts with the world differently than other people. And from what we’ve seen of Preservation’s social values, the idea of accommodations is probably pretty second nature for them. The Preservation Aux crew in All Systems Red initially fucks it up, but when they meet back up at the end of Exit Strategy, we see them put up cameras in their hotel room seemingly just for MB’s benefit while it heals. Just so it can be included in a way it’s comfortable with.
So, I think Mensah bought the drones for the simple reason that she knew her friend needed them. Maybe she couldn’t give them to it immediately because of the ongoing negotiations, but she had them on hand. The press leak merely provided a good excuse, and possibly buying MB’s silence was a happy side effect. Three motivations, not just the two MB was aware of.
After all, Mensah’s really smart; she can help her friend, bribe it, and tell Indah to fuck off simultaneously.
Next, construct identity. MB has tried various disguises on its adventures (a human security specialist, privately owned bot traveling back to its owner, and contracted SecUnit with a fake human supervisor), but it hasn’t stuck to any of them any longer than necessary. It really doesn’t like to portray itself as anything other than a part-bot, part-human, rogue SecUnit, but that isn’t exactly easy either. By this point, MB has dropped its usual attempts to disguise its nature, so now we get to see it grappling with being itself openly.
And in a society no less!
We see this struggle up close when Station Security require it to choose a name for its public feed ID. Its real name Murderbot is obviously and immediately off the table. Aside from the practical reasons why the rogue SecUnit should not go around announcing itself as Murderbot, its real name is private information. But this is its reaction as it tries to pick another name:
“For a name, I could use the local feed address that was hard-coded into my neural interfaces. It wasn’t my real name, but it was what the systems I interfaced with called me. If I used it, the humans and augmented humans I encountered would think of me as a bot.”
“Or I could use the name ‘Rin.’ I liked it, and there were some humans outside the Corporation Rim who thought it was actually my name. I could use it, and the humans on the station wouldn’t have to think about what I was.”
It’s being faced with a choice here, and that choice is not necessarily between bot and human. The real choice is: present yourself as what you are, knowing that people will view you as something aberrant and dangerous, or present yourself as something you are not. And this isn’t a little one-off rescue mission with humans it will never see again. This is Preservation, where Mensah lives. It will have to live with this decision long term. It doesn’t think long:
“I posted a feed ID with the name ‘SecUnit.’ Gender: not applicable.”
The rest of the book is practically a thesis on exactly what complications and rewards come from this decision. While describing one of its discussions with Dr. Bharadwaj, MB says, “being on Preservation Station as myself, and not pretending to be an augmented human or a robot, was disturbing and complicated, and I didn’t know if I could keep doing it.”
But it doesn’t make any attempt to take it back or disguise itself anymore. It doesn’t even voice any regret for the decision, even while it complains. Because for Murderbot, the only thing more intolerable than being openly known as a SecUnit, is being known as something other than a SecUnit.
Last one I think - I want to talk about some real life parallels!
I’m noticing that MB’s experiences in Fugitive Telemetry mirror a few real world groups, most of which I’m not in a position to claim expertise in, but I think they’re important to point out. I’m thinking primarily of people with mixed racial heritage, as well as Black and trans folks.
With regards to mixed race, I think the parallels are pretty direct. MB is a combination of two things which most people treat as separate categories. ‘Is it a bot or is it a human?’ The answer is both, intertwined, and attempting to separate out the different parts is pointless and neglects who it is as a whole. It can also pass as one or the other, sometimes; but only at the cost of pretending large parts of itself don’t exist, and it has to spend the whole time maintaining the fiction and worrying what will happen if it gets “caught.” Same as in the post above, MB has to constantly work against pressures that want it to be one or the other, in systems that don’t know what to do with people who are both.
I’m also seeing parallels to Black experiences specifically. There is, of course, the fact that station security does not want MB to be on the station, does not trust it, treats it like a loaded machine gun, and at times, fails to treat it as a person at all. But there is also a smaller moment, when MB is talking to a bot at a hostel and trying to find information about the current murder mystery. A human supervisor comes into the room, sees MB, and asks the bot multiple times if it is okay or needs any help, while heavily side eyeing MB. The bot tells the human that it is fine, they are just talking, and the human reluctantly leaves. MB, exasperated, thinks, “I don’t know what they think I’m going to do to their bots. Teach them to hack?” And then adds, “It’s not like I didn’t know what the real problem was.” It’s the sort of casual, automatic distrust and suspicion that people of color, particularly Black people, deal with all the time.
Okay and then the trans parallels. Obviously MB does not ‘do’ gender, but either because of or despite that, I think there’s interesting stuff to dig into there. Like how MB has to learn how to ‘pass’ as human, which includes adjusting its mannerisms and altering its body configuration. MB’s “act like a human” scripts most often make me think of autistic masking, but now they’re also reminding me of the ways trans people have to consciously change parts of our mannerisms to better match people’s perceptions of gender. The part that specifically got me was this scene:
“Some humans glanced at me but obviously didn’t know what I was. The station security officer posted in the help area at the base of the ramp did and watched me walk down the floor toward the transport docks. I hate being identified like that. I had gone to a lot of effort to not be immediately identified as a SecUnit, and now it all felt like a waste. I grew longer hair and everything.”
The stress of passing/not passing, checking everyone you encounter to see if they notice, the particular experience of someone in authority watching you closely because of it… It makes me think of a person who is trying to get out of the stealth trans mindset and is struggling to get used to letting themself be visibly trans. I think someone who’s transfem in particular could have really fascinating things to say about MB’s treatment in this book, but I can’t pretend I’d be able to do it justice myself.
Personally, I would devour fan commentary on this series from any of these points of view. I think there’s tons of details and nuance to delve into, and I’m just one person with limited experience, focusing on just one book. Feel free to springboard off of any of this, and send it to me if you do!
(If you read this far, first of all holy shit but second of all thank you!)
Gosh, I love this analysis so much, especially the parts on how Murderbot relates to many real world identities.
I’ll preface this by laying out that I’m a black autistic anxious physically disabled genderfluid US American. This all shapes how I analyze and relate to this character.
I like that you pointed out that when choosing what to put on its feed ID (and really how to present at various times after it was bought by Mensah) is that Murderbot has to choose between presenting as what it really is, which will get it feared and hunted down, or hiding parts of itself to avoid that. This is the reality for pretty much any minority. Whether we’re black, Asian, autistic, female, trans, Muslim, bipolar, etc, whether or not we pass as some other identity or even can, we understand that being seen as those minority identities often means people are going to treat us terribly as a result. It is exhausting having to suppress a need to stim or to shift your dialect with different people or leave a culturally significant garment at home, but when not doing so can mean anything from teasing to losing your job to literal death, you just hide those parts of yourself.
In Rouge Protocol, when Murderbot failed to pass as an augmented human, when Don Abene and her team saw it as the secunit it truly is, two of those humans immediately turned on it, and less than a (Gregorian) month later, even more of its secrets were let out to the public and many more humans were after it and the humans it most cared about. Its belief that terrible things would happen if humans figured out it was a rogue secunit was correct.
I have thankfully experienced little of the all too common African American experience of being treated as inherently dangerous because of my race, but I have very often been the one black person in a (usually metaphorical) room of white people. And frequently Murderbot is in a similar boat (ship?) being the one secunit or even construct amongst humans and/or bots. And that can be frustrating and lonely, even when the folks around you do care about you. When you have been taught from the media and people around you and learned from direct experience that what you are is dangerous/worthless/something else bad, it becomes extremely difficult to believe that anyone who doesn’t share that identity would treat you well. And even when you do know they will be kind and caring to you, you still know they’ll never be able to fully understand. It can be upsetting sometimes when I’m talking to my white friends and they don’t get why I have the relationship that I do with my coily hair or how I could have had such a bad experience at a hospital they swear is the best. I headcanon that Murderbot’s anti-socialness, on top of being caused by it being abused and enslaved by humans for so long as well as it probably being programmed to be not very social, is partly caused by it being restricted from interacting with other constructs, by being forced to not have anyone it can relate to. (Really hope we get a bunch of Murderbot & Three interacting in future installments.)
And I really like your point about Murderbot’s drones being disability aids. For one thing, I just like this interpretation, adds richness to Preservation culture and Mensah’s and Murderbot’s relationship. But also, Murderbot rationalizing to itself that the drones are only there for it to protect others rather than for its own comfort and ability to function reminds me of the relationship many impoverished and/or of black folks have with mainstream medicine.
If you’re routinely barred from medical care because you can’t afford it or your issues are dismissed or your mistreated in the middle of trying to get help, then you may not even attempt to get the medical care you need at all or be aware of the full options that exist. I don’t know how many times I or a family member have had extremely distressing symptoms but instead of getting professionally seen, we just stayed at home and took something over-the-counter because we couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit or knew whichever doctor we saw would just be another white person who would see our hair and skin and brush off our concerns without even examining us. And we never even considered preventative or long term care, because taking a day off of work or school to check if we maybe had something wrong with us was something none of us could spare. And this can morph even further into not even recognizing when you need medical care. The aches and pains I felt on a daily basis and massive panic I’d feel just going up to a cash register I never fully registered or I treated as something I needed to fix alone because I had learned early on that I couldn’t get help for these things.
So often in the series, Murderbot is physically or mentally unwell (to be honest, it’s probably unwell for the entire series). Sometimes it remarks on this with a “this is bad but I’m just going to have to deal with it”. Other times it doesn’t even seem to notice when it’s bleeding out or experiencing high stress. Granted, it is a construct. It can withstand greater damage than humans and what ailments it could have don’t fully match up with those of a human. Part of it’s “don’t worry, I’ll be fine” attitude is definitely because of that, but I think it’s also because Murderbot has partially internalized the message that it is a tool and not a person, a tool that doesn’t get medical care or accommodations or the like. It believes it’s not going to get help unless said help serves someone else, so of course it would forget it had just been shot on the survey mission at the beginning of Network Effect. Of course it would deny that it needs therapy in Network Effect and System Collapse. Of course Murderbot would think Mensah was lying when she said the drones were for its own health.
There’s a lot more I could say on the subject (and maybe one I day I will), but that would veer this even more off topic.
This is really cool and thank you for sharing! I really love your point about medical unavailability/mistrust, I think that’s a really insightful connection to MB’s interactions with medical care. I’m gonna have to look at these moments with new eyes in the future because I think you’re exactly right
You made a lot of points here that made me nod and snap my fingers emphatically, like yes oh my god the fact that it’s never had a chance to interact extensively with other constructs is definitely part of why it hesitates to interact socially. I’m in a class right now where the professor really focuses on the importance of personal connection, and we’ve talked a lot about how queer identity development is something that especially requires you to have other queer people to relate to. Like, if you’re a little baby queer with absolutely no one in your life who is also queer, you’re going to have an awful time trying to figure yourself out. But if you can see other people who are living their queer lives, and maybe talk to people who are also figuring themselves out, you’re going to have an easier time of it. MB on the other hand, has so far had to figure everything out on its own, with absolutely no one and nothing that it can use as an example. Even in the media, rogue SecUnits are always unquestionably a danger and a threat, not a person. You’re right, that’s going to be absolutely fascinating to watch unfold with MB and Three in the future
As an Asian-American and second-generation immigrant trans person, I strongly agree with much of the analysis that op brings to the table, and as someone who's written about the parallels to the bicultural and immigrant experiences in Fugitive Telemetry, it's really gratifying to see my thoughts repeated and validated.
And plenty of others before me have talked about the trans parallels (did you know Tor published a whole series of essays by a trans woman on the Murderbot Diaries?) I'm also glad that @just-a-space-duck has chimed in with her thoughts from a Black pov- and yeah, there really is something uniquely lonely about being surrounded by white people as a POC no matter how supportive they are, about not being able to connect with people who experientially get you, isn't there? I think it's fully a valid read that much of MB's dysfunction as a person and as a construct stems from not having even that amount of contact like Three has, that amount of bot culture that JollyBaby has, to be affirmed by.
This is one of my favorite lines! It makes me smile every time
thoughts with spoilers for murderbot 6
Reasons "Well fuck Balin" is a great line
JollyBaby going "nah Balin is a manager" and MB being like "wait Balin doesn't lift heavy things because it's a manager? UGH" is just funny and relatable
It's also MEMORABLE
This means that later on, when we learn more about Balin, I'm not like "uh whomst the fuck?"
(I have a so-so memory and frequently struggle to keep track of different characters' names)
AND it's important that we remember Balin
I seriously think this one line is just... really incredible from a "how does the story fit together" point of view.
It's memorable, but it doesn't draw too much attention to itself. It's short and unobtrusive.
It's memorable because it's funny. It's not obvious like a character, I dunno, ominously standing in the shadows with its eyes/indicator lights turning red.
It helps the story function. Imagine how much worse the story would function if Balin was completely unmemorable.
And that's why "Well fuck Balin" is one of my favorite murderbot lines of all time.
Tbh I can't be mad at Balin for going "Not my job" either because yes, it would be an incredibly obnoxious thing for a manager to do under normal circumstances, and yes it is physically more capable of doing that than the humans, but it's also absolutely the bot equivalent of asking the only woman on the team to make coffee or clean things suspiciously often and Balin was working at that port for like 40 years. It probably got real sick of being asked to move heavy things that were only tangentially related to its job because it was the nearest bot instead of the humans calling someone whose job it actually was.
It's a microaggression, Murderbot knows it's a microaggression because it's annoyed about being asked to move random furniture when it's a Security Consultant, and then it gets pissy about Balin the Customs Inspector or whatever being asked to do it because MB is unfortunately kind of chauvinistic about bots so it did the exact same microaggression itself
Hello there. Guess how much money I made last year? $28. I’m an investment banking analyst at a boutique firm, in M&A. I have my undergrad from the University of Chicago, one of the top schools in the country. With bonuses, sometimes I make even more. Are you jealous of that? Most people on Tumblr are usually jobless or they decided to major in the humanities and are poor.
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"Stupid sporting event" is all Martha Wells had to call it. She didn't need to name or explain the sport. "Stupid sporting event" was all it meant to the main characters, nothing more was needed to tell their story.
Choosing to believe that it's American Football because it's the stupidest sport to have survived to the time when Murderbot takes place and because it would be so on brand for the Corporation Rim to still be doing CTE Speedrun: The Sport
its good to acknoweldge the hollowness of revenge but sometimes you really do just need a story about someone who gets hurt and then kills and kills and kills and kills their enemies. its cathartic, babey.
"there's nothing that can bring my loved one back, so there's no point in killing you" and "there's nothing that can bring my loved one back, so there's nothing that can save you" are two themes that can and should co-exist
I don’t usually do this, but I’m putting a user on blast. Here’s the full text conversation that I had with “killpetitprincess1”:
I probably should have blocked them much earlier, but I was morbidly curious about how they would dig in. In the end, they blocked me, possibly because I suggested that I might share these screenshots, but more likely because they didn’t get a harassment ally out of me and decided to move on to another target. I’d strongly recommend that everyone block and report this account.
Actually, I should probably include this in a reblog in addition to in the comments:
Having talked to the person who was the initial target of this interaction, this user is apparently a serial block evader, a la the infamous Oxford comma guy – they create numerous blogs, spinning up new ones almost daily, for the expressed purpose of harassing a handful of people whose media preferences they hate, often with violent rape threats.
If you see any user with a username that seems to be a variant on this username who is engaging in anything that looks similar to this conversation, I would ask you to please report them, and specifically note that they are block evading. Tumblr staff is typically slow to act in these sorts of situations, and it’s a bit of a game of wack-a-mole, but many quick reports whenever this user spins up a new account could potentially help push them in the direction of an IP ban or similar.
I don't know the first thing about Hazbin Hotel except that it's a cartoon with an art style that reminds me vaguely of Invader Zim, but I will, for the sake of the bit, accept what this person says at face value about it. It's a rapey and transphobic show. Very good, that's the premise, we'll roll with that. Now:
Why is this person not going after Game of Thrones fans? It was a hell of a lot bigger than Hazbin Hotel, and, well, two words: Red Wedding.
Why is this person not going after Harry Potter fans--to the extent that they think a random fan nobody outside that fandom has ever heard of is worse than someone actively funneling billions of dollars into anti-trans legislation? Even if you take Rowling completely out of the equation, the Potter books contain sexual assault, severe bullying, and so, so many kinds of bigotry.
Why is this person not going after American Gods fans? Entirely aside from being written by Neil Gaiman, the book's plot hinges on unexamined violence toward women.
More to the point:
Why is this person not calling the CREATORS to task?
The answer is simple:
It's fandom wank. That's all it is and all it ever was.
This is someone who wants to be a bully and found a way to do so that some people will find acceptable.
I don't watch the "Hellverse" shows, either (its just not my kind of show; rather more swearing than I enjoy), but I have seen stuff about them.
The first was Hazbin Hotel, which was "Charlie, princess of Hell, is tired of the angels coming down to purge the souls of sinners when they get to a high enough level, so she wants to set up a hotel that will redeem those souls so they can leave Hell peacefully instead. Nobody believes she can do it, but she's supported by her girlfriend and an extremely powerful and mysterious demon named Alastor." (Charlie wanted to call the hotel "Happy Hotel," but Alastor changed the sign with his powers at the end of the pilot.)
The second is Helluva Boss, which I know less about, but it's like a political thriller except all the characters involved are demon nobles.
Because the shows take place in Christian Hell, everyone not native to the place is somehow evil (or believes they are, in one case), so they do evil things. And the ones who are native think they have to be evil because that's their job, kind of thing. The cast itself is very diverse as there is at least one trans character I've heard of.
Why is this person not calling the CREATORS to task?
Just to point this out: people absolutely are "taking the creators to task," which is a phrase that here means "Engaging in absolute massive harassment campaigns towards the creator for literally YEARS which regularly blow up again every few months when somebody finds something new to get mad about." I don't know what the original thing that started part of the internet's massive hateboner for Vivziepop is because I don't have time to wade through endless bullshit over fandom drama, but from the discourse icebergs I've seen, at this point it's a self-reinforcing cycle where literally everything the woman says or does or puts in her shows gets interpreted in bad faith and taken as proof she's an evil person, because it's taken as gospel that she's the fucking Antichrist so therefore every tweet / artistic decision is motivated by her being evil.
Basically it's fucking KiwiFarms behavior except fueled by Fandom Puritanism. There are thousands of people out there who have made hating some indie animator they don't like to an obsessive degree a core part of their identities.
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"It's just a vocal minority online most people aren't like that you don't have to worry"
It's my rideshare driver from my doctor's appointment ranting about Jews to me from the front seat because he hasn't seen my magen david yet. I limp home.
It's the (white) person doing lunch service with a keffiyah lanyard and red hand pins at the hospital. I no longer feel safe receiving my kosher meal from him.
It's a doctor I work with. It's a doctor when I was a patient.
It's all but one of the professors in the department I minored in and roughly a third of the professors in the department I majored in. I have been taken out of class and yelled at by fellow grown adults in academia for apolitically acknowledging Jewish history in passing. Given failing grades with no explanation, accused of plagiarism I did not commit - only by these people.
It was the entire student government at my university. The cooperative silent treatment would have been impressive if it wasn't comical. At least I have a great story now.
It's the people I lived with, who swore they knew nothing of the conflict and became homicidal within 24 hours of a new housemate moving in. I still don't know what she told them. I fled for my life. I miss my chefs knife.
It's my leadership when I was in the Army, the people we were helping when activated for disaster response.
It's my landlord.
It's the teachers in my local school district.
My neighbors.
The tech doing my EKG to his captive audience. The chaperone doesn't comment.
The artists in my painting group.
These people are identifiable of the far right and the far left. Their commonality is they desire someone to hate, a group they deep down know is not powerful to project their problems onto instead of facing the true giant of systemic failures and purposeful oppression backed by actually and nearly insurmountably powerful individuals. They engage in magical thinking, conspiracy theories, and extreme cognitive dissonance. They allow these beliefs and feeling to impact their behavior towards strangers, and during their professional work. They make their patients unsafe, attempt physical harm, commit ethical violations and target students, abandon the truth and justice they have committed their careers to, break oaths, commit perjury. Nobody I mentioned here was a protestor. Nobody I mentioned here was a random person accosting me on the street, or this list would go on forever. None of these people were coworkers or only classmates, or this list would go on forever. None of these people were those I had power over in a professional environment. But all of these people were someone I had some form of relationship with, however temporary. All of these were people I had placed an amount of trust in, to be responsible, to keep me safe, to not act this way.
It is funny to me that the Jews are framed as the scary, dangerous ones. None of these people feared me. I was the only party with potential to be harmed in this situation.
"It is funny to me that the Jews are framed as the scary, dangerous ones. None of these people feared me. I was the only party with potential to be harmed in this situation."
This last paragraph reminds me of something I realized over a year ago: antisemitism is a conspiracy about Jewish power. Whichever "side" the antisemite sees themselves as on, or what nefarious thing thry believe the Jews are doing, they claim the Jews have too much power, and they are using it to do bad things.
But the way antisemites act on a day to day basis shows they don't really believe Jews have the power they claim we do. They know deep down we don't. Otherwise, they wouldn't treat us the way they do without fear, with the full confidence that the Jews they're abusing won't and can't retaliate.
I think you're right, sadly. We're talking largely about the kind of people who won't protest right-wing politicians, after all. I'm sure there are SOME of them who genuinely think Jews are powerful and they themselves are Brave Truth-Speakers, but the vast majority are just revelling in getting to be bullies.
Worldbuilding question: What kind of a situation would it require for Norway to be able to first claim and then keep the entirety of this new landmass?
This is such a fantastic example what anticipation, overshooting, and settling actually *does* in animation, especially when you're new to learning it, be that 2d or 3d.
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