per @etirabys’s request, here’s a paste of a whole lot of highly spoilery words about my favorite Horizon: Forbidden West NPC, who makes so many bad decisions
alright, so- the game in question is Horizon Forbidden West, a big AAA action game about hunting robot dinosaurs. the interesting stuff is almost entirely unrelated to the robot dinosaurs.
the backstory of this game is- a while back, evil military company made a big military AI that went out of control and took over a bunch of military robots and started wiping out humanity. standard stuff. principal characters are a couple of scientists who were part of the last-ditch effort to try to prevent this from happening before the machines wiped out humanity.
one of them, Elisabet, is spearheading this thing called Project Zero Dawn, whose plan for saving humanity is “build an AI terraforming engine equipped with a bunch of human embryos, hide, and wait for the apocalypse to finish and then re-terraform the dead world”. the other one, Tilda, works for a company called Far Zenith whose plan is “let’s just build a spaceship and GTFO”.
Elisabet is a big deal- genius scientist, multidisciplinary, very famous. Tilda is less of a big deal- she’s like a PR person for the space company, but is head over heels in hero worship for Elisabet.
this relationship is fairly loosely sketched out, since it’s only conveyed via backstory and a few audio logs. Tilda asks her out, and Elisabet is- she’s the kind of person who’s totally consumed by duty and doesn’t know what having fun is, and while she’s interested on a physical level, she proves incapable of sustaining a relationship. they break up after a few months- and then their companies start competing for the dwindling resources left as the apocalypse progresses. things turn sour.
Tilda believes- correctly- that Elisabet’s going to die if she stays behind to do her project, and she’s still in love, so she tries to invite her to abandon her world-saving project and join her in space. this doesn’t work, and in their final conversation Elisabet blames Tilda for being complicit in the shortsighted military-industrial fuckery that’s going to imminently destroy the world. this is the last they ever see of each other.
but that’s not where this ends.
Tilda goes off into space with the rest of her company, and they develop advanced biotechnology and she becomes immortal. meanwhile on Earth, that Zero Dawn thing Elisabet was working on… it has problems. doesn’t work quite right. the details are like, the whole plot of the game (two games, actually, forbidden west is a sequel) and involves a whole lot of fighting robot dinosaurs.
but the main thing is- the AI terraforming thing, in an effort to fix itself, decants a clone of its creator, Elisabet Sobeck, to try and create someone with the gene-print authority necessary to fix itself. this clone is the protagonist of the game.
this is, like, a thousand years after the initial apocalypse. a whole bunch of Video Game occurs in which this Elisabet clone, Aloy, saves the world and stuff. and then… Tilda shows up on Earth.
Far Zenith apparently had a problem with their space colony and it got destroyed, and now her and the last few survivors- insanely technologically advanced- have fled back to earth in hopes that Zero Dawn succeeded and the terraforming project would be there intact. they want to take control of the terraforming project and re-terraform the planet to their specifications, wiping out the native life, blah blah blah they’re the villains of this game.
Tilda has an important role in this plan. They’re aware that the terraforming project requires a clone of Elisabet Sobeck to operate, so they made their own. And Tilda, for totally non-ulterior motives, volunteered to raise this clone.
The clone, Beta- her role is just to open doors for the badguys, and her education is spartan and abusive and all-around horrible, designed to turn her into a tool. Tilda does not like this. She feels bad for the clone, and creates a secret VR replica of her house which she covertly invites the clone to, to teach her about art and music and poetry in between the horrible drills. And attempts to woo the teenaged clone of the ex who rejected her and then died.
Beta’s life is this woman running this bizarre abusive hurt/comfort homeschooling experience, and she regards Tilda as both the source of her suffering and the source of her relief and has a bunch of complicated feelings. Beta, like Elisabet, is also terminally duty-poisoned and submits to all this semi-willingly because she’s told it’ll save humanity.
this whole scenario would be enough for me to want to tell you about on its own- but it gets even more fraught.
the other bosses start to catch wind of what she’s doing, and she eventually shuts down the VR house and cuts off contact with Beta to protect her from reprisal, which Beta interprets as abandonment and adds a whole other layer to this nightmare smoothie.
this- and also witnessing the various evil villain stuff they start doing on earth- causes Beta to defect and be rescued by Aloy, her badass videogame protagonist dinosaur-hunting clone. she dumps all this Tilda-related trauma on Aloy and starts plotting to bring her down. Tilda, meanwhile, is despondent, because Elisabet Sobeck broke up with her again and she blames herself for it again.
but then she discovers- oh. hey. hold on. there’s another Elisabet. this one is a sexy twenty-something dinosaur-exploding badass who’s sticking it to her awful coworkers and saving the world.
she has another chance!
so she bides her time, and- during a climactic cutscene where the other baddies all show up to re-kidnap Beta- allows them to kill Aloy’s friends so that she’ll be defenseless and alone, and then picks that moment to jump in, betray her bosses, and rescue Aloy at the last minute.
Aloy wakes up in the basement of Tilda’s actual house, which contains a vault full of classical paintings and various art, and Tilda tries to do the same high-culture seduction act as Aloy’s selfless savior.
this Elisabet Sobeck is also duty-poisoned, and has a hundred questions, and her attempt at playing the wise benevolent savior falls flat. she has like. a fancy dinner prepared on a balcony at sunset, to make it as romantic as possible- but oh, fuck, this Elisabet Sobeck is also duty-poisoned and can’t think about anything but world-saving, she’s about to fuck it up again.
so she frantically tries to rewrite the script and concedes a bunch of stuff and Aloy very forcefully tells her her plan to betray the others is stupid and won’t work and here’s her much better plan, which is of course a dance she’s danced before. but she refuses to give up on making it work with this woman who’s into her but has rejected her three times.
ultimately Tilda is the final boss of the game, after her various attempts to get in good with Aloy by helping her betray the main villains don’t work as intended. she tries to get Aloy and Beta to run away into space with her (there’s another twist final act threat to the earth, not really relevant), and when they reject her again she summons a big robot to try and kidnap them. the final boss is not difficult as a fight as much as it is difficult to listen to this woman completely lose her mind throwing everything she can think of at the wall to try to get Elisabet Sobeck to give her another chance.
it’s way more fucked-up and poignant than i was expecting from the big AAA robot dinosaur fights game. this woman tries every awful move in the book to make her ex love her again and just keeps taking it too far and self-sabotaging.
anyway that’s it. the main thought i had walking away from that was “oh man, i know exactly who would eat this up, and also there’s zero chance she plays like 200 hours of videogame to find out about it”
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(the incredible secondhand fuckor in those DMs) #Horizon: Forbidden West #reactionblogging #abuse cw #apocalypse cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#Twilight #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself)) #abuse cw
You have the strange one-of-a-kind ability to know, just by looking at a sheet of paper, what is meant to be written on it. Growing up this helped you ace every school exam with no one the wiser, but as an adult you’ve found it has other advantages – and disadvantages.
I was Anne, once. Anne with an e, like in the old book.
No-one here knows my name. Here, I am Rosetta.
It seemed so harmless when I was younger. When I looked at a paper, any paper, I knew what should be written on it. It started with my diary, when I was very young. Then quizzes and tests at school, essays and reports and so on.
It doesn’t work on blank paper. Blank paper is neutral. Uncommitted. It needs to be committed to something. A title or heading is often enough. Sometimes I need more specifics to get me started, maybe a short precis or something. Translation and code-breaking are easy – they put them on a form, with spaces for the translated words, and those come through very clearly.
When the war started, I volunteered. Many of us, the ones with gifts, did. Our duty, we thought. For our people, for our country. So we came forward and admitted to our gifts, and put them at our country’s service.
That was about sixteen years ago. I have not left this facility since.
They don’t tell me much, but I don’t know why. It’s not as if they don’t give me every coded message to decode. I know more about the war – the current one – than most of them do.
This is the second, or maybe the third. There was a break, but so short that it might just have been a cease-fire, or a temporary truce. They made an effort to pretend to me that the same war had lasted, but after a while I tactfully pointed out to one of my handlers that I spend more time reading top-secret communiques than they do. His angry embarrassment was very amusing.
My days are monotonous, but not altogether unpleasant. I eat well – not fancy food, but wholesome, tasty food. Every day, I spend half an hour doing exercises, to keep my body in good condition. I spend my evenings reading, watching movies, listening to music, whatever I feel like. If I’m unwell, a doctor attends me.
It took me some time to make it clear to my handlers that they would have to make me comfortable. That wasn’t a pleasant time, and I still have some scars. But eventually I was able to talk to someone capable of reason, not just obedience. My work takes concentration. It’s hard to concentrate if you’re uncomfortable. If I’m hungry, I can’t concentrate. If I’m in pain, I can’t concentrate. If I’m tired, I can’t concentrate. If I’m uncomfortable – too cold, bad chair, all the little discomforts they tried to use to break my will – I can’t concentrate.
If I can’t concentrate, I can’t work fast… and I make mistakes.
So I’ve been reading about someone who was ideologically abused within Catholicism and it’s bringing up a lot of feelings, but one thing it’s really crystallizing in my mind is an important thing that people fail to understand about ideological abuse.
The (relatively mild) ideological abuse I have experienced was used to convince me of some bad and harmful shit. But I’m worried that the things I’ve said about it make it seem like the abuse was bad because it convinced me of untruths. That’s a very very small part of the problem.
It is possible to commit ideological abuse in the name of ideas that are 100% true. People think that ideological abuse is only done in the name of darkly comic nonsense (Xenu only makes sense to someone who’s been abused so badly they forget how to think clearly) or ideologies based on cruelty and subjugation. It’s true that abuse is more common in ideologies that cannot possibly defend themselves with actual arguments, but it’s completely possible to abuse people in the name of things which make sense.
If you’re dealing with someone who thinks two plus two is five, you can show them they are wrong with counters or numberlines or whatever. This will teach them basic arithmetic and also respect their personhood. This is what any decent person would do.
Or you can control them with fear. You can make it sure that they know that if they ever say two plus two is five, they will be physically harmed or threatened with physical harm. You can lie and belittle and mistreat them in dozens of ways and any time they complain you can tell them that they deserve it for believing that two plus two is five. You can say that they’re not allowed to make even the smallest decisions for themselves (what to eat, how to dress, who to be friends with, what to read) because a person who believes two plus two is five shouldn’t be allowed to decide anything. You can isolate them from anyone you haven’t vetted (which means no friendships with anyone who is wrong about math, but also no friendships with anyone who says “obviously two plus two is four but there’s no need to hit people over it.”) The fact you are right about math doesn’t make it not abuse. You’ve abused them into believing something, and the fact that it is true doesn’t make the abuse ethical.
You’ve also severely damaged their ability to learn math. If they have a basket with two apples and they add two pears, they won’t be able to take an honest look about how many total fruits they have. They are only going to be able to think “I must have four fruits because I don’t want to get hurt again” or “I must have five fruits because there is no way on earth that despicable piece of shit can be right about anything after what they did to me.” You’ve done lasting and possibly permanent epistemic damage to this person. For a long time, maybe for the rest of their life, they will not be able to approach arithmetic with logic; they are going to come to a calculator with so much emotional baggage that they can’t be rational. They may genuinely need to espouse wrong beliefs about numbers because the only psychologically feasible alternative is espousing the (also wrong and more dangerous) belief that they deserve to be abused.
Almost everyone who commits ideological abuse thinks they are convincing their victims of the truth, and they think that this justifies the abuse. They are usually wrong about their ideas being true, but they are always wrong about their tactics being justified. I want anyone reading this to know that if you are seriously hurting someone to get them to believe you, it doesn’t matter that you are right. You have to find another way to do that. What you are doing does horrific damage and doesn’t even succeed in making people actually believe you, just in parroting you so that you will stop hurting them. You have to treat people who are wrong like people. Abusing someone into believing the truth doesn’t become okay because it’s the truth.
More importantly, I want you to know that if someone is using violence, the threat of violence or manipulation to control your beliefs, that is abuse. You do not deserve to be treated this way. You do not have to figure out right now whether what they are trying to make you believe is actually correct. You can leave (if it’s safe) or practice harm-reduction (if leaving isn’t safe yet) before you figure out whether or not they are telling the truth. It is not okay for them to do this to you, even if they are right.
You deserve to be safe. You deserve sovereignty over your own thoughts. Good luck. I love you.
someone reblogged this tonight saying she was not sure if she was “entitled” to this and i just want you to know that anyone is entitled to this
Tags:
#I’ve been thinking about this post a lot lately #abuse cw #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
At least, she appears to. I am no theologian. God, in her infinite majesty and power, is beyond canine comprehension. Her glory is ever ancient, ever new. Perhaps her apparent new smell is merely an artefact of my own perception. God changes her fur into new fur every day, and sometimes even has no fur at all when she is in the Realm Of Wet, but she is always the same God. But these last few months, God has smelled different. Her voice sounds higher. Her touch is softer. And when she speaks to the other Gods, in the inimitable divine tongue, they seem to refer to her with a new name.
(I say she: The Gods, of course, transcend our simple canine categories of male and female, but she smells female now. Perhaps this is a lesson to show me the true boundlessness of God – the Gods do not fit into the little boxes our minds can understand. But then again, it is beyond me to guess at God’s will.)
Since I became a follower of my God, I have always known that my God is the best and greatest of all the Gods. All the Gods are powerful; not all the Gods are loving. I was born in the world of Gods who were… less merciful than she is. Of course, it is hard for us to fully understand the depths of our own sinfulness. Perhaps when they left me alone in the yard for days, it was intended for my spiritual growth. Perhaps when they hit me, it was only to give me the chance to learn virtue. Perhaps when my old Gods zipped me up in a holdall and cast me out it was divine justice. I mean, I peed on the rug all the time and I was always whining when they didn’t take me for walks – do I really deserve to live?
I confess that when she became my God, I feared her divine justice. In my sin and foolishness, I had come to believe that the gods were only a source of pain. I moved from her hands, fearing she would hit me. In my unloveliness I fell upon the lovely toys she had given me. She was with me; I was not with her. And yet she asked me “Who is a good boy?” and broke through my deafness; she shone the holy light of her laser pointer and broke through my blindness; she petted me and I burned for her peace. I see the others at the dog park with their Gods and I know that my God is the greatest God of all. No other God is like her.
I know I am unworthy of the mercy, the salvation that my God has offered me. Perhaps it was my sins that caused her to weep so much in the past, to be so afraid to the other gods, to lie in her resting place for hours without moving, staring into empty space. Yet my God always showed me joy when I came to her. When I buried my face in her body, her weeping always ended. When I asked her to walk me, she always answered my prayer. Perhaps, indeed, it is a sin to imagine that my own sins are the cause of her weeping: how can I understand the mind of God?
But since my God got her new smell, the weeping happens less. She laughs more. She does not lie for so long in her bed. And I do not even need to pray in order for her to take me on walks. It would be blasphemous to say that I can know the thoughts of the divine, and yet I cannot escape the feeling: my God seems happier. And God has chosen, in her generosity, to share this beautiful new happiness with me.
The indescribable depths of divine generosity are, presumably, how she manages to tolerate the cat.
I’ve noticed the servant smells a little different these days. Moping less, too – which is good. This one is very sweet and I am pretty attached to her, in spite of myself. She does still keep trying to get me to eat that dry food, but I’m firm with her and after enough meows she usually gets the message and gives me a proper meal. You just have to stand your ground with servants – make sure they know who’s boss. Treat them nicely, but not too nicely.
I know one shouldn’t get too attached to one’s servants. When my last servant died, it really got to me. He was very affectionate, and never even attempted this dry food nonsense. But he was very, very old. I know that humans have very long lifespans – but not forever. I really shouldn’t have let him become so dear to me. It was… when I found him cold in his bed that morning, and it became clear he wasn’t waking up, it was a very nasty shock. I still have nightmares about it.
When I found my new servant, I told myself “don’t let yourself get too close to this one. You never know what might happen.” But, well, what can I say. I’m soft-hearted. She’s a hard-working girl, cleans the litter box promptly, doesn’t skimp on the treats, handy with a laser pointer. And when I got here, she always seemed so sad. I don’t know what happened to her but, well, I missed my own servant, and I understood what pain is like. So I’d snuggle up to her when she was lying in bed – which she did a lot, just staring into space and moping. I mean, it was a warm place to sleep. But also, it seemed to help her a little bit.
Since she got the new smell though, she seems better. Making those weird little human noises they make when they’re happy. Mixing more with the other humans. Smiling. It’s quite cute, honestly. And – you know, she’s young. She seems healthy enough. Maybe it’s not so terrible to be a little bit attached to this one.
She’s not perfect. It’s going to take a while to train her out of this dry food habit. But she’s a good girl, all in all. I’m glad she seems happier these days.
Don’t understand why she still insists on keeping that dog around though.
I was a bullied child, and solitary. (Isn’t that always the way?) It was a winter day, impossibly bright As only winter days can be. I was out behind the school. (It was Saturday. That was why, really. No other kid would be there to bother me. On weekdays there might be other kids here Who would bully me If I tried to play here.)
There was snow on the ground. The puddles of slush on the parking lot Looked like deep, cavernous lakes of ice. There was a mulberry bush I called a blackberry bush That gave up sweet fruit in the late spring And a rock As tall as I was That we made believe was a mountain.
Between them there were trees And bushes A woods too small to be called a forest. And today Unlike yesterday The bushes bent into an arch And the arch stretched into a tunnel of branches.
Through the arch I smelled spring. Flowers, and grass. Anything really – in the cold you can’t smell. Warm air wafted on my face And I knew what this was.
I was reading the latest one of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and I got to the point where the child goes through the gate, and I realized… that could never have been me.
My mother really was disabled – she had fainting spells, and then she had hypoglycemia, and then she had diabetes – and I’d felt it was my responsibility to take care of her since I was four and she was crying because my grandfather was in the hospital. She also probably suffered from anxiety and was known to flip out from terror because I got on the wrong train.
For obvious reasons, no one tells the story of the child who doesn’t have the adventure because they have responsibilities at home. So I decided to. It’s a lot shorter than the story of the child who had the adventure.
It’s interesting that the protagonist assumes the portal is something *good*.
I went down a path once. Like yours, it wasn’t *quite* a forest, but the path was lined with trees and smaller plants. At the end of the paved path, what looked like a desire-path bike trail stretched off into the distant fields, leading who-knows-where.
It was…*peaceful*. Incredibly so. The trees shook in the breeze, and the leaves fluttered across my vision with different shades of green on each side, and the sound of their rustling brushed against my mind.
There was power there. It hummed in my bones, resonated through my soul.
I did linger. I let the power flow through me. Once.
And then I left, and I swore never to return. Because I know how that story ends, and it ends with me getting kidnapped by the Fair Folk. I’d walk out onto that narrow path, called by some ineffable compulsion, and never be seen again.
That’s not how I want my story to go.
Tags:
#*knocks on wood* #in which Brin tries not to become an erotic-horror protagonist #(…I never quite make that explicit up there in the main post‚ do I) #(I guess I can’t think of a good way of doing it) #(probably an important part of the context though) #reply via reblog #storytime #fae #sexuality and lack thereof #abuse cw #kidnapping cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #[epistemic status: Pascal’s Wager]
So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly working my way through the Red Panda Adventures. Recently I reached episode 100. Towards the end, our heroes are surrounded by a group of hostile sapient zombies (long story). There are too many to take them all out in combat, so the Red Panda uses his mind-control powers to put them to sleep. This being a Christmas special, he begins this process by calming them through evoking the joy and contentment of Christmas.
“You idiot!” I yelled. “You’re begging for an abreaction!”
(I managed not to actually yell this out loud. I was out for a walk, as is my custom when listening to the Red Panda Adventures, and I didn’t want the neighbours to get weirded out.)
For those of you who don’t speak hypnosis jargon, basically an “abreaction” is when a hypnotised person responds to a suggestion in an unexpected manner, generally because they interpreted it in a way the hypnotist didn’t intend, or something about the phrasing reminded them of something and sent their mind off on a different track, stuff like that. It doesn’t necessarily go badly 100% of the time, but–like all forms of miscommunication–it’s usually best avoided when possible, and this one definitely would go badly if it happened.
The trouble is, not everyone associates Christmas with joy and contentment. All it takes is one bitter Jewish kid (*ahem*) or something, one person whose associations with Christmas are negative, and the thing’s going to blow up in his face.
Now, hypnosis as practised in the Red-Panda-verse is very different from the real thing, so in the abstract it’s not inherently a bad thing to have this in-universe expert hypnotist doing things that even I, a person with no training who simply travels in the right circles to overhear hypnotists talking shop with each other, recognise as mistakes. But in this case, the differences between our universe and his make this worse. In the real world, if your induction backfires because it turns out your subject hates Christmas, you just feel kind of awkward and embarrassed and have hopefully learned a valuable lesson about not assuming everyone likes Christmas. But because he’s weaponising his psychic powers, his suggestions have to work, first try, without a hitch, without discussing it with the subject in advance, or he might die. It is, literally, vitally important for him to keep his inductions as generic and universal as possible, and not pull risky, your-mileage-may-vary shit like the spirit of fucking Christmas.
(For the record, he got lucky and it didn’t backfire on anyone. Still a stupid risk.)
To be fair, it’s easier for me to spot this because, as a bitter Jewish kid myself, I didn’t have to put myself in anyone else’s place to see why this was risky. I can tell you right now, anyone tries an induction on me based on the feeling of Christmas (foreignness and resentment and the particular type of lonelinessone feels when surrounded by a crowd of happy people whose joy one will never share*), it ain’t gonna go well.
*You know what, Christmas could actually make a decent metaphor for being undead, or vice versa.
amango-tea said: Christmas for me was anxiety attacks and spending extra time with my abusive father because he was off work and you’re SUPPOSED to spend time with your family. If someone tried that trick on me, I hope they would be willing to deal with me being triggered as fuck! :Db
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(There was also another reply, but I posted it at the time [link].)
Tags:
#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #abuse cw #Red Panda Adventures #reactionblogging #sexuality and lack thereof #rants
finding out people dont usually add numbers by first adding something to make a ten (for example 7+6= 7 plus 3 is 10 plus another 3 is 13) & that its actually an adhd thing is the WILDEST shit literally ive lived like 10 years (or however old i was when i learned to add and stuff) thinking thats how everyone does it. what the fuck
Oh yeah! This is also part of why autistic people/people with adhd struggle in math classes. Our brains process math and numbers in a totally different way. Many people on the spectrum struggle with the “show your work” part of math because we can’t exactly tell you why it works/how it works. We just kinda do it
So I don’t innately do this but I was taught to do it? Now I’m really confused.
(I wonder if a disproportionate number of people who homeschool for primarily religious reasons, and/or of the people who create curricula marketed to that audience, are autistic or ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent. It would sure explain the absolute scathing scorn for the idea that children need “socialization”, and possibly the popularity of theme-integrated “unit studies” and self-directed “unschooling”… and it could evolve pretty easily by those originally being the kids who did a *lot* better homeschooled than in public schools… hmm.)
(Every so often I circle back around to the question of whether any of the things that make me think I’m autistic are inborn or whether they all come from my upbringing. Because my sperm donor is definitely autistic and also an abusive asshole, and my bio-incubator may be autistic or ADHD or something else along those lines but by *god* does she have the executive dysfunction in spades. And they’re both controlling as fuck. So the only way to socialize Correctly was his way, and the only way to get anything done was her way, and given childhood neuroplasticity… does it really matter if I was born autistic or whatever I am? Am I just irreversibly whatever-it-is now and I should be learning to work with it, or am I accidentally meandering back toward neurotypicality (and what does that mean for my online friendships if so), or was I actually neurodivergent all along and it’s just the extroversion confusing me? :P)
Not sure about fundies as such, but FWIW I was in secular homeschool groups (though this included a fair number of relatively laid-back religious types who didn’t mind hanging out with the rest of us) and they were very autistic. And they got distilled to increasingly high concentrations of autism the older they got, because allistics were a lot more likely to leave for public school. Groups of homeschooled teenagers tended to be upwards of 50% autistic, and a lot of the rest had autistic siblings.
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The method of addition described in the OP is implicitly being contrasted with some “normal” way, and I’m curious what that normal way actually is. Anyone know?
Tags:
#autism #homeschool #my childhood #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #abuse cw #math #reply via reblog
Imagine being told “you can escape the wrath of the inquisition if you can prove that the witnesses would have reason to slander you, but we’ll never tell you the names of those witnesses” and you respond with “no problem, here’s my list of one-hundred and fifty-two mortal enemies”
Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.[1][2] This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size.[3] By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain only 150 stable relationships.
Tags:
#Christianity #history #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #torture cw? #abuse cw?
The Time Hagrid Told Voldemort How to Take Out Something Protecting an Object that Grants Immortality When He Was Drunk and Other Well-Meaning Fuck Ups a lengthy chapter
That Time Molly Yelled At The Twins And Ron For Saving Harry From Abuse And Starvation, Thus Likely Communicating To The Abused Kid In Her Presence That His Welfare Was Less Important Than Not Borrowing The Car, That Time Molly Was Utterly Condescending About How Harry Is A Child And Doesn’t Deserve To Know Anything In A Way That Probably Heightened His Determination To Prove Otherwise, That Time Molly Said The Twins Put Together Aren’t As Good As Any Of Their Brothers Over OWL Results That They Worked Hard On And Were Proud Of, That Time Molly Forcibly Cut Her Adult Son’s Hair Right Before His Wedding, That Time Molly Spent A Year Being Mean And Rejectful Toward Her Son’s Fiancee, That Time Molly Sent Hermione A Deliberate “Fuck You” Present For Easter Because She Believed A False Story Written In Witch Weekly Without Making Any Attempt To Ask The People Actually Involved, Those Times She Made Her Youngest Son’s Christmas Sweaters His Least Favorite Color, And Every Time She Belittled Her Husband’s Hobby, The Twins’ Interests, And Bill’s Appearance Because She Couldn’t Be Bothered To Understand Or Value Or Even Be Kind About Thema detailed reminder that no one’s perfect and sometimes what one person doesn’t mind or see hits another person hard
Florean Fortescue Just Wanted To Sell Some Ice Cream And Help Harry With His Homework He Is The Only Adult Who Didn’t Mess Up Until Getting Killed By Voldemort, RIPan increasingly strident addendum by me
OK You’re Absolutely Right Florean Fortescue Was In Fact Perfect As Far As I’m Awarea concession by me
Tags:
#Harry Potter #meta #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(I’m not saying it doesn’t also make some good points) #(just that the Florean Fortescue bit makes a great punchline)
Brinens and Things 