I’m working on a concept for angels as a type of undead— human corpses animated by light.
They can’t see, having been blinded by the brightness of their transformation, and the illusion of wings comes from cuts down the length of their spine, allowing light to escape. Much like vampires, they maintain some semblance of their living personality, at least at first, and need to eat something special— in their case, the magic in the flesh of other undead creatures.
The setting I’m making them for sees them as a terrifying necessary evil in places where they’re plentiful, as they hunt worse threats, but they’re often misinterpreted as holy defenders in places where they’re scarce.
They definitely are NOT defenders of humanity, especially as they get older and their minds start to wear down. Older angels can rarely tell individual people apart, stop communicating entirely, and are known to kill people who have even been NEAR other undead because they smell like food.
Eventually, if they haven’t been hunted down by humans to make them stop, they start trying to hunt other angels and get killed that way.
Vampires in this setting are the whole package— hypnotic mind control, shape shifting, making thralls, superhuman strength, generally incredibly hard to kill. Light weakens but does not kill them, at least when it’s normal sunlight.
Humans struggle hard to deal with even a few of them, but angels pry those suckers from their lairs like shucking oysters and devour them.
Angels happen when someone is killed with light without their body being destroyed, which is very very hard to do by accident. The setting has a few powerful entities living outside society who use magic like that, and at one point, angels were people who pissed them off.
Of course, angels are very useful, especially when they’re young. There are some groups that send people out to bother entities of light on purpose, and eventually a ritual for making one without outside “help” was developed.
Human-created angels are usually either volunteers from cults that think of angels as holy creatures, or people nobody would miss being turned into vampire hunters against their will. You can tell the difference by how the cuts on their back are made— the cults use lines of carved runes, while sketchy alchemists make straight cuts on either side of the spine. Angels made by pissed off non-human entities usually claw at their backs until they tear the skin, so their “wings” are jagged.
[ID: reply from @neojet280 reading “How long does it take for them to lose their mind after the turn into angels? Years? Decades? Centuries?]
Good question! Generally the Brain Weird starts to kick in after a decade or two, and you get to the point where they’re not really themselves anymore by 50 years. By 100 years in, they stop behaving like social creatures, and from there it depends on the individual how quickly they stop being safe to be around.
Mental decline in the undead is universal, but timeframes vary! Vampires remain functional for centuries and lose themselves around 500-600 years, while ghouls rarely maintain any personality by the end of the second year and revenants can only function without being puppeted for a decade or two.
Vampires— robust supernatural powers, keep their minds for centuries, created by other vampires via biting, feed on human blood (animal blood is not sufficient)
Angels— light magic, minds are lost by 150 years, created by killing a person with light, feed on the bodies of other undead
Ghouls— can keep going with huge pieces of their bodies missing, mindless by their second winter, spreads like a bacteria, feeds on any living flesh
Revenant— powers vary, become empty puppets by 15-20 years in, created by human magic to be undead slaves, draw energy from their summoner or can be fed the flesh of magical creatures
The plot of this is about a city that suffers a flood and finds itself abruptly overrun with ghouls. This leads to the local alchemist’s guild kidnapping people to make angels, which gets the vampires involved, which attracts the older angels, and so on.
I’m thinking about this setting again! Today’s world building bit:
Vampires do have a strong negative association with garlic, but not because of anything to do with the garlic itself. Vampire hunters have a potion they take that makes their blood highly toxic to vampires, and one of the side effects is sweat that reeks of garlic. As this isn’t commonly understood by the common people, rumors spread that vampire hunters were keeping garlic in their clothes to ward them off.
I’m working on this again, so I gave it a name— a sunken pyre! monster hunters use funeral pyres to burn the bodies of people killed by ghouls or vampires before they can wake back up as the undead, and a failed job or out of control situation is often euphemistically referred to as a pyre getting rained on or otherwise trying to start a fire using damp wood.
A sunken pyre, being underwater, would be a VERY dire situation. The plot also starts with a literal flood, so, twofold!
As I work on the human characters, I’m also developing monster hunting organizations! First off— the ones with the dogs.
The Graveyard Houndsmen are a primarily rural brotherhood, formed to deal with ghoul outbreaks centuries ago. While not a strictly religious order, their work is highly ritualized and most of their traditions are safety rules turned into superstitions.
The Houndsmen adopt and breed dogs that have survived attacks by ghouls near graveyards, unknowingly breeding for resistance to the blight of the undead while believing the animals themselves to be supernatural— church grims. Because these dogs are often strays, the breeding lines vary wildly in traits.
The members of this order take vows of chastity and refuse to see doctors, as they are virtually all infected with the undying plague, the poorly-understood magical phenomenon that turns the dying into ghouls. The curse is in the blood and can be sexually transmitted or passed to a child that is conceived by them. (Some houndsmen exploit a loophole by having non-reproductive sex with each other, though. Don’t be a snitch, the head of the chapter doesn’t need to know.)
Because the order is a lifelong commitment, Houndsmen give up their family names, all using “Grim” as a surname. The majority of them are men, but women are not banned from the order unless they have living children.
The Houndsmen are well-loved by the communities they serve, in spite of being a bit odd and intense. Being entrusted with one of their hunting dogs that has been injured or grown too old to work is considered a huge honor, as it is believed that the grim’s spirit will protect the home of those who cared for it after its passing. There’s even a popular fairy tale about a child turning around their family’s fortunes by being kind to a stray dog that turns out to be a Houndsman’s companion!
The Houndsmen are rare in larger cities, where cremation of the dead is mandatory to avoid ghoul outbreaks. Their reputation is damaged somewhat by being seen by city folk as similar to the next monster hunting group I’m going to talk about— the Keepers of the Undying Light, a very ethically ambiguous order of alchemists that deal with vampires. They were the original creators of the ritual to make angels without outside help!
The Keepers are a broad and diverse organization, most of which operates in secrecy. The alchemists rarely do much fighting themselves, instead working with angels, revenants, and hired help to accomplish their goals. While their public goals and general mission are positive, they have a corruption problem and tend towards “the end justifies the means” in their plans.
Keeper hunters are basically mercenaries, and the problems with their employers are more likely to fuck them over than anyone else. A LOT of them die on what they didn’t know were suicide missions, end up as revenant puppets, or are mutilated by alchemical experiments done on them under the guise of medical care.
The Houndsmen are obviously not a perfect organization, as they’re too broad for true oversight and they live and breathe superstition, but they’re too reliant on the good favor of the common people to get away with large scale abuses. Almost all of them are technically homeless, generally being cared for by communities another Houndsman has protected as they travel around for jobs. They really need their good reputation!
The main Houndsman in the story is Arlo Grim, a man on the edge of middle age who has been to a proper city maybe twice. He isn’t really prepared for the level of political intrigue the Keepers of the Undying Light bring to the table.
It’s time for plot, so, first, let’s talk about the Undying Plague.
The Undying Plague is a blood curse, a unique type of magic that functions like a bloodborne pathogen. It is particularly widespread due to its difficulty to detect before a cursed individual dies, as well as a general reluctance to destroy the undead it produces before they get violent.
For most people, the curse does nothing until your death, at which point it raises you as a ghoul. The longer you lived with the curse, the longer the resurrection takes, with ghouls that have more time to “cook” being stronger and more resilient, but with less remaining of their minds. The quickest resurrections are around 20 minutes, and the slowest take a few days.
Because ghouls get violent as their minds decay, which happens very quickly in most situations, it is very dangerous to have them around. However, because ghouls originally maintain their personalities and memories to some extent, once they’re awake their loved ones have a tendency to hide them. To avoid this, cities have strict laws regarding immediate cremation of the dead.
Most people with the Undying Plague don’t know it, and most would-be ghouls are burned before anyone realizes they were cursed. Generally, the only sign of a spreading outbreak (assuming it’s being spread by the living, and not by ghouls biting people) is cases of ‘rotting fever’, a deadly allergic reaction that afflicts people with especially high magical sensitivity when exposed to the curse. As getting the curse itself kills them, their revival is nearly instant, and the new undead decaying and losing their mind is mistaken for a living person with a disease.
So, what happens is this: 30 years ago, a pox went through the city of Larkhollow. While the fatality rate was low, the situation overwhelmed the city’s doctors and alchemists, causing over a dozen cases of rotting fever to be missed. The open sores of the pox and the poor sanitation in the poorer areas of the city left more than half of the city unknowingly cursed with the Undying Plague.
However, with a recent contagious disease in everyone’s memories, sanitation picked up, and cremation rules were enforced more strictly. The situation went unnoticed until the city’s dam broke 3 decades later.
The resulting flood killed many people, with a lot of bodies being lost in the water. The deceased had carried the curse for long enough to be nearly mindless as they woke up over the next few days, turning their attention to the survivors still trapped in the city.
Complicating the situation, Larkhollow played host to a collection of vampires whose lairs were no more resistant to the flooding than the above ground buildings. Suddenly exposed, they are in full survival mode, hiding among the human survivors and trying to avoid or sabotage the monster hunters suddenly all over the city.
All of this finally brings us around to the primary angel character, who was previously kept hidden by the local Keepers when she wasn’t vampire hunting. Her name is Lior, and she was an unmarried young woman raising her younger sister 30 years ago, when the Keepers used the pox as a cover to kidnap a number of test subjects to make new angels.
At the time of the flood, she is the only surviving angel in Larkhollow, as the older angels had been culled by the Keepers and the others who had been created beside her had either been taken to other cities or died during a conflict between Keeper factions 3 years prior.
Shortly after becoming the main defense for the city, Lior is recognized by her sister, Sadie, who never believed she’d wandered off to die of illness.
Tags:
#storytime #angels #aging cw #illness tw #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
You get to open a video-game style character creation screen and customise your body at will, to anything within range of human variation (no cat ears, sorry). This includes letting you set a new biological age, get rid of any physical health issues, and so on. Your new appearance seems unremarkable to anyone who knows you, all government databases with your picture are adjusted, etc.
You get 150 000 USD every year for the rest of your life without having to do anything for it. You don’t pay taxes on this money, it adjusts with inflation automatically, it appears entirely legitimate to any authorities, etc.
what do you choose, and also, are you trans or cis (if you’re tempted to answer ‘it’s complicated’, round off to trans)?
Choose:
My tag ramble was so long that Tumblr cut it off (apparently the current limit is 30 tags), so I’m dumping it into the main post body:
#I’ve been wavering on whether to reblog this for ages
#I felt kind of bad about piling on to Sofi’s notespam like that
#but it being context for the next post has pushed me over into “yes”
#I didn’t realise until after voting that the character creation is one-time-only rather than ongoing access
#which makes the correct answer less *obvious*
#but I stand by my vote of cis | character creation
#(as it happens I *am* considering doing a second puberty through this‚ but they’d both be estrogenic)
#(honestly I’d barely even need the magic ID updating)
#(29-year-old me in 12-year-old me’s body could pass for 29 about as well as I could in 29-year-old body)
#(the two mes look pretty much the same: it’s all a matter of how you act)
#((well‚ 12-year-old me was a little smaller‚ but within the adult range and her face was already more or less stable))
#(((ooh‚ I bet I could tweak it so that I *stay* five-foot-one this time around)))
#(((during my first puberty my body map never updated for my final growth spurt‚ and
#I’m not *dysphoric* about being two inches too tall‚ but it does get a bit disorienting sometimes)))
#anyway my point there is that…a lot of people in the notes are going “money can be exchanged for goods and services”
#but I think in this case that’s actually backwards
#while money and health do both feed into each other
#health can be exchanged for money to a much greater degree than money can be exchanged for health
#money can *maybe* buy you the *appearance* of 9 – 17
#–(depending on how much puberty I can get away with doing again without fucking up my brain)–
#more years of youth‚ but it won’t buy you the lifespan nor the functionality of it
#money can buy you the ability to *breathe* your homeworld’s atmosphere even during pollen season
#and enough of it can buy you the ability to *talk* while breathing it
#but it can’t really buy you the ability to eat and drink while breathing it‚ and that’s a significant handicap in itself
#(not to mention the street harassment you get wearing a prosthetic immune system (to keep your built-in immune system from freaking out))
#likewise‚ money can buy disease *prevention*‚ but not the ability to shrug it off once you’ve caught it
#the ability of money to buy more robust bones is extremely limited
#(have I ever broken a bone? no! but why settle for merely *adequate* bone strength when I can have *optimal* bone strength?)
#((…god‚ why is anyone who is not *actively dying* for want of resources taking the money over the health))
#((I was so very aware‚ that time last year that a ventilation floor grate broke beneath me‚ that if I’d been 80 I would have *died*))
#((but I was 28‚ and I got away without even a broken bone))
#((why would you give that up any more than you have to))
#the list goes on
#meanwhile‚ health can buy you a nice steady low-non-physical-barrier-to-entry job as a farmhand or dockworker
#(not *as* steady as magic income‚ yes‚ and I *do* care a great deal about that‚ but I care about health *more*)
#and I’m not altruistic enough to take more money than I need so that I can give the rest away‚ not given what else is on offer
Tags:
#reply via reblog #tag rambles #surveys #transhumanism #gender #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #adventures in human capitalism #aging cw #death tw #poison cw? #injury cw #illness tw?
fucking bizarre that computers heat up while operating. like dude it’s just math
i too heat up doing math. They’re not special
it’s worse than that. the laws of physics require doing math to produce waste heat.
it’s bonkers that the answer to “can i make a more efficient steam engine” is “no, and btw all good is temporary”, but it’s objectively even funnier that the answer to “can my fucking cpu stop throttling” is “no, bc otherwise you could make more efficient steam engines”
Tags:
#that one post with the thing #aging cw #apocalypse cw
#hmm #I like the aesthetic‚ but…it’s hard to settle this out into words… #…it’s not safe to go straight there‚ even if you could #the single best argument in favour of technological progress is that if we do not‚ we will die in mere decades #I don’t mean the species; I’m not talking about extinction #I mean each of us‚ individually‚ is mortal #that’s a problem #it is the ur-problem #and while I wish we could have the best of both worlds #and I do think we should strive to make this the best of both worlds #when I think about life as a hobbit vs the life I have… #…at least this way I have a chance #seven percent of all the people who have ever lived‚ it is not too late to save #oh‚ I hedge‚ as hard as I can afford to #I do want to buy the mes who are *forced* to adopt non-industrial lifestyles time #every day is valuable (well‚ except the days with colds) #but in the long run‚ to take up that life by *choice* would be to condemn myself to death #tag rambles #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #death tw #apocalypse cw #aging cw #disappointed permanent resident of The Future
i think grossness is a vital aspect of life btw and we all experience it and i think its important to represent in art and i think oversanitization of popular media is 100% our downfall. things are gross and disgusting and yucky and thats life we cannot deny ourselves this
I keep thinking about this in the context of caring for my ageing patients. No one TELLS them, before they’re old, how things are going to change, or why. No one talks about the loss of elastin, and how that doesn’t just affect your skin looking old, but also how it heals. No one warns them that their skin will become paper-thin if they live long enough, incredibly fragile and easy to tear. Just “hurr dur wrinkly!!!”
No one tells them their bowels are going to lose strength and coordination, so it gets more and more difficult to have bowel movements. No one warns them about obstipation, much less bowel obstructions. I have a saying I repeat often in clinic: “Proper pooping prevents problems!” I say it because it makes people chuckle, because it destigmatizes needing to poop. Everyone poops. And it turns out pooping requires both a complex network of nerves to create peristalsis, and stools soft enough to move through the bowels, and I have watched more than one elderly patient die because their bowels stopped working right.
No one talks about hemorrhoids, so I have patients coming in terrified by blood in their stools–and listen, blood in your poop is definitely a good reason to see a doctor; if you’re over 50 and you haven’t had a colonoscopy, get one. It’s the best health screening we have evidence for, in my opinion. Colon cancer is a bitch. But more commonly, people have bloody stools because they have either hemorrhoids that are bleeding or because they have an anal fissure after straining on a hard bowel movement. Do you know what a hemorrhoid is? I didn’t, until I was well into medical school. Everyone has them. They’re venous columns that surround the rectum and anus. Internal ones can bleed; external ones can itch. Most people will get them eventually. Be kind about them.
Everyone is going to have trouble peeing if they live long enough. Men can’t start, women can’t stop. Because people with prostates will often have benign enlargement of the prostate–it’s not cancer, but it gets bigger–and the urethra, the tube that lets urine leave the bladder, goes through the prostate. Bigger prostate = compressed tube, less flow. Meanwhile, people with uteruses have much shorter urethras, which means that when we lose that beautiful collagen and elastic, we also lose it in the two sphincters that help us keep from leaking urine, and so we leak urine. Especially when something triggers an increase in intra-abdominal pressure, like a sneeze or a cough or a laugh.
All these things people are taught to be ashamed of and embarrassed about–they are so common. They’re normal parts of having a human body and doing the things one does with a human body. Poop trouble? Welcome to the club! People have been writing about their cures for constipation for as long as written language has existed. Listen, you are not alone. You are not alone. You are not alone. And that means that when someone else has a gross problem, you must be kind to them, because that is going to be you. There will be a day when you have diarrhea, because viral gastroenteritis spreads like wildfire every winter. There will be a day when you cough a huge glob of mucus comes out, because mucus is a natural defense mechanism and kind of miraculous but also nasty. Every gross thing a body can do, yours is likely to do, if not now then later.
Be kind.
Most of the responses to this are about how gross bodily stuff shouldn’t be stigmatized, it shouldn’t be viewed as a moral failure, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, and it shouldn’t be covered up or lied about, especially since it can be very important information for health.
Which is indeed the important message here, so I’m glad there are so many responses like that!
But I do want to go back to the initial post saying that “grossness is a vital aspect of life” and “we cannot deny ourselves this”.
Maybe it’s just saying that our lives function a certain way right now and we aren’t currently able to change that. But a phrasing like “vital aspect of life” really sounds like it’s going beyond that. It sounds like it’s saying that if it was possible to live a life free of this gross stuff, that in itself would constitute some sort of impoverishment of experience.
And sure, maybe deep grossness (as opposed to just, like, finding the architectural style of someone’s house to be vaguely yucky according to your personal tastes or whatever) is something that some people would miss having in their lives if they somehow didn’t have it; maybe they actually would feel impoverished and would go seek out gross experiences, and I want them to be able to get what they want!
But not everyone would miss that. If it was possible to live without the gross aspects of life that are currently inescapable, that would be a great thing for some of us. I wouldn’t be losing any important part of who I am, if I had the choice to live without that gross stuff and I took it.
Tags:
#…yeah to me the obvious reading of OP is ”escapist fiction is wrong‚ if you’re not disgusted by what you’re watching you #ought to get a different movie” #(I originally wrote ”reading” and ”book” there‚ but actually this is a much bigger issue with video because it’s harder to skim) #the stuff in the comments about the importance of having forewarning about aging is good‚ but… #…are they *sure* they’re actually agreeing with OP? #I’d be a lot more willing to reblog that comment if it weren’t attached to OP #originally I’d decided against it‚ but with this new addition I’m leaning towards #(I guess the main argument I can see for not reading OP that way is that #there’s a difference between saying *more* media should be gross and saying *all* media should be gross) #(but…what media environment are they living in such that the grossness levels are far too *low*?) #(*I* go upstairs in the afternoon and find Mom watching a movie about people dying horribly of hyper-Nipah‚ you know?) #((and that’s if I’m lucky and she doesn’t try to watch it in the living room over the speakers)) #(and honestly I’m still not 100% over the very visceral food-poisoning scene in Minority Report) #(people in movies are *constantly* yelling in each other’s faces‚ making out‚ getting covered in blood) #((sometimes all in the same scene!)) #(yeah‚ yeah‚ I know‚ something something pathogen-stress hypothesis) #–((it’s a different person‚ but I notice the aging-forewarning commenter casually mentions viral gastroenteritis as ”a day”)) #((which‚ uh))– #(but god‚ please‚ don’t make *me* live at *your* setpoint) #tag rambles #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #unsanitary cw #discourse cw #medical cw
In the last 3 years I got tinnitus, feeling like I’m suffocating, and joint pain added to my moment-to-moment suffering. That’s 1 constant burden added per year. Let alone the several other minor things breaking during that time that I notice daily but not constantly.
At this rate I’ll have about 50 problems as bad as tinnitus weighing on me at any given moment by the end of my expected life span. Actually, rumor has it that new problems accelerate as you get older rather than showing up at a constant rate, so if the last 3 years aren’t a fluke, 50 could be too optimistic.
But that can’t possibly be true, right? Yeah, aging is bad, but if it were that bad people would get almost-universally institutionalized indefinitely in their 40s as the constant torture accumulates, probably, and that clearly isn’t the case. It’s gotta be better than what my gut instinct suggests the future will be like, right?
Right?
I used to wonder about this myself (right down to the annual frequency), and from my experience thus far it seems like at least part of the answer is: not all long-lasting problems are permanent. They sometimes mysteriously *disappear* just as they mysteriously appeared.
I’m not prone to earwax clogs anymore (as I was for roughly a decade). I don’t get waves of stomach pain every night around 12:50 AM anymore (several years). I usually don’t have an itching response to my own sweat anymore (~two years). I tried stopping my use of dandruff shampoo recently to see if the dandruff would come back, and so far it *hasn’t*.
(This isn’t even counting the late-onset dysmenorrhea, the chronic constipation, or the once-frequent rashes on the backs of my hands, for all of which the underlying tendency is still there but very well-controlled.)
I’m not *planning around* the possibility that, say, my ability to breathe unfiltered outdoor non-winter air will someday return, but I acknowledge that it might and I’ll gladly accept the bonus to my expected quality-of-life if it does.
In the last 3 years I got tinnitus, feeling like I’m suffocating, and joint pain added to my moment-to-moment suffering. That’s 1 constant burden added per year. Let alone the several other minor things breaking during that time that I notice daily but not constantly.
At this rate I’ll have about 50 problems as bad as tinnitus weighing on me at any given moment by the end of my expected life span. Actually, rumor has it that new problems accelerate as you get older rather than showing up at a constant rate, so if the last 3 years aren’t a fluke, 50 could be too optimistic.
But that can’t possibly be true, right? Yeah, aging is bad, but if it were that bad people would get almost-universally institutionalized indefinitely in their 40s as the constant torture accumulates, probably, and that clearly isn’t the case. It’s gotta be better than what my gut instinct suggests the future will be like, right?
Right?
I used to wonder about this myself (right down to the annual frequency), and from my experience thus far it seems like at least part of the answer is: not all long-lasting problems are permanent. They sometimes mysteriously *disappear* just as they mysteriously appeared.
I’m not prone to earwax clogs anymore (as I was for roughly a decade). I don’t get waves of stomach pain every night around 12:50 AM anymore (several years). I usually don’t have an itching response to my own sweat anymore (~two years). I tried stopping my use of dandruff shampoo recently to see if the dandruff would come back, and so far it *hasn’t*.
(This isn’t even counting the late-onset dysmenorrhea, the chronic constipation, or the once-frequent rashes on the backs of my hands, for all of which the underlying tendency is still there but very well-controlled.)
I’m not *planning around* the possibility that, say, my ability to breathe unfiltered outdoor non-winter air will someday return, but I acknowledge that it might and I’ll gladly accept the bonus to my expected quality-of-life if it does.
Tags:
#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw #medical cw #illness tw? #injury cw? #venting cw?
Just broke my personal record for consecutive days lived..Going for the record again tomorrow
Tags:
#it’s my birthday today and I was thinking about this post again #just broke my personal record for consecutive years lived! #going for the record again next year #birthdays #death tw #aging cw #that one post with the thing
talking about flters and real beauty vs fake beauty and cultural standards etc always makes me think about all the victorian and edwardian novels i read, where the things that people thought about beauty were recorded at length. recently ive been reading a lot of Thomas Hardy (best known for Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) and there’s so much discussion of the beauty of people, particularly love interests, both men and women. and these writers, and their eras, and the culture of the eras, was of course obsessed with beauty and youth and also artificial beauty (being the eras of the really transformative corsets, not to mention some of the earliest industrialized or modernized beauty products or processes), as all human societies are to a greater or lesser extent in their own ways, but the thing that sticks out to me in reading these books is how beauty is not the singular or even the most important aspect of a person’s overall attraction. if someone has a beautiful face or figure, it is mentioned, but never to the obsessive, fixated extent that physical beauty is isolated from and elevated over all other features in modern american/western culture. there are plenty of protagonists or love interests in these books who are described as not young, or not remarkable, or not pretty, or even ugly or frightening, but nevertheless compellingly sexy and attractive, or simply interesting, or worthy in some way.
its weird that the cultural consciousness has become seemingly ignorant of non-physical attraction. like that anon that was in my inbox talking about how they were “normal looking’ and therefore “needed” filters in order to “compete” with attractive people. it’s a weirdly mercenary and capitalist view of the social economy, first of all, which absolutely is not zero-sum no matter how badly the social networks want to convince us that it is. but there was never a single mention from that person about their ability to charm or entertain or attract using anything except a fake photo of themselves. wild. im fuckin worried about them! im worried about every young person how has brain worms
when i was about 4 and starting to become aware of how much adults were obsessed with my appearance because i was dainty and blonde and could do a passable shirley temple imitation, my parents gave me a very serious lecture about what physical beauty actually meant: i didn’t work for it, it was given to me genetically. and someday, maybe sooner or more suddenly than anyone could predict, it would be gone. if accident, illness, or hardship didnt get me, old age eventually would. so with that being a certaintly, i had better build a life and a personality on something other than my looks. and i said, ok. every day i get older im more grateful for that advice and the fact i decided to take it to heart instead of trying to gamble on Being Hot for long enough to get job security. which is also a valid career choice but it’s a risky one. always better to have a fallback just in case.
im of an age rn where a lot of women in my peer group are starting to get a very hunted vibe about the impending end of their youth, which is valid. theres nothing foolish about it, its not their fault, theyre not stupid or somehow lacking because this is an issue in their lives. but im noticing that i am significantly less freaked out by, idk, how long ago the 90s were or whatever, because i have been expecting to get old since i was in kindergarten. and i had adults around me who were just like “hey this is what old people look like and what bodies do over time. its not a big deal. everything on tv is fake btw”. i didnt get out unscathed, ive had eating disorders and all sort of weird brain-body problems.
my advice i guess if i have any is to go outside and really look around you. notice how almost every single woman, and most men, has at least some cellulite, even if its just when theyre sitting down or whatever. notice how everyone has blemishes and zits. most people have some dandruff. if someone is wearing makeup, it’ll be cakey or balled up or smeared or uneven or clumpy even if it’s just a bit. everyone over the age of about 20 will have stretch marks somewhere, even if they aren’t visible except in certain light. i was under the impression i didnt have many until one time seeing a picture of my butt in FULL natural light and finally saw the entire surface of both cheeks was covered in straitions, they just were hard to see most of the time because im the color of drywall and scars tend to be light. it’s really easy to spot hair extensions and wigs and fake nails and fake tans and shapewear once you figure out how to see it. and none of these things take away from someone’s character.
there’s a strong argument to be made that when corsetry was the norm, no woman was expected to simply be the shape of the corset unless she was actually wearing it. photographs and drawings of women in the 19th and early 20th century were retouched a bit as all photos have been, yes, but they were not retouched to make naked women appear to be corset-shaped. THAT is new. people are now getting surgery to be corset-shaped. and like, i dont think anyone should not be able to look however they want if they want to have that surgery. that is one meaning of cyborg feminism, probably. what i dont want, is for anyone to ever think that’s a normal way to look (except for veryvery tiny mathematical outliers, the Barbie Hips Georg of instagram) WITHOUT surgery or shapewear. which i see a lot now. i saw an instagram fashion designer with a very obviously surgically-altered body answer a question in her inbox about how she maintained her figure with some nonsense about diet and exercise. so now some (probably young) person out there is thinking that if they just do intermittent fasting enough, theyll look like a woman with butt and boob implants, a BBL, fillers, etc. that person probably thinks that if they arent able to diet and exercise good enough, they will fail at looking that way through their own laziness and lack of work ethic or whatever. i see that mindset constantly, especially in young women.
the surgery isnt the issue. the look itself isnt the issue. the filters themselves arent the issue. the issue is that on none of these images, is there an indication of what has been changed or how. the brain damage effect of filters would be lessened, i think, if everyone KNEW which images had been altered and how. so maybe thats the answer? mandatory labeling? i dont know. what’s terrifying is that the average adult human in america cant tell from a glance what has been altered in a photograph, no matter how clumsily, because they simply dont have a template for what a real human looks like anymore. the false images have supplanted the real images, the actual memories of alive humans that you know and have met or lived with.
if you go into any of the shittier men’s spaces online you will find threads for posting pictures of “beautiful girls”, and it is page after page after page of teenagers in full makeup, hair extensions or wigs, circle lenses, facetuned, bodytuned, surgery, etc, and then hundreds of men yearning and fanning themselves over her “natural beauty”. dont go looking for this stuff, it will permanently fuck you up to know what a basic guy on the bus is thinking about women every day. dont do it
but i also seriously predict a backlash into “natural” looks after this current madness, similarly to how the 1960s saw the rise of the hippie girl with swingin titties, pit hair and no high heels after the consumer beauty madness of the 50s. of course the 60s beauty ideals were in some ways just as fake, but there was some authentic yearning towards a freedom from capitalist bodies as well. so when that happens send me $20: paypal.me/3liza. should be in like the next 4 years or so. thanks
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#you know that one xkcd with the hunting-abandoned-pets-for-sport discourse? #that’s how I feel about beauty discourse #I am *completely* not plugged into this scene #and every once in a while I come across a missive from this‚ fucking‚ dystopic universe #do *all* allos have to deal with this kind of shit?? #I hope y’all get through okay in there #(this also gives me a very different perspective on aging discourse) #(it really rubs me the wrong way how many people assume that if one wants to avoid aging it’s because one wants youthful *beauty*) #(when to *me* it seems obvious to want youthful *functionality* and youthful *stability*) #(I’ve got one of those bodies that doesn’t really visibly change between ~13 and ~30) #(I’m 27 now and I’ve had this face for so long that even my faceblind ass can recognise it!) #(*not* looking forward to the day that I look in the mirror and see somebody else!) #(and more importantly I’ve been acquiring new chronic conditions almost every year since I was 23) #(and I shudder to think how many maluses I’m going to be operating under by the time I’m 40 or 50 or 60) #((…although in fairness it seems like some of them might not be permanent after all?)) #((some of my keloids seem to be fading and almost never give off growing pains or itching)) #((I still often itch *immediately* after sweating but it doesn’t consistently last until I rinse the sweat off anymore)) #((maybe someday I’ll be able to breathe outdoors again‚ or lie on a mattress without feeling every goddamn spring)) #((that would be nice)) #tag rambles #discourse cw? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #aging cw
Brinens and Things 