Subject: Reading between the lines
Author:
Posted on: 2015-08-09 22:09:00 UTC
I guess that so much bureaucracy made your brain shrivel. I am not actually suggesting that — gods above, that means sticking Rina and the Reader with you and the Librarian in a locked room. I might be silly but I am not cruel.
~Desdendelle
(I only promise one thing: to introduce you to Amris and notify him that you have a taste for the fine arts. -The Librarian)
Agent Desdendelle calls in a friend for some help on a mission. (Eragon x Ratchet & Clank)
It's taken me a while a get round to reviewing this, but I did enjoy the mission.
I also found it quite easy to follow, which was nice, as I know nothing about Eragon and very little about Ratchet & Clank. There were a couple of points that I found hard to follow, the one that sticks in my mind the most was Des referring to the 'R.Y.N.O.' - if you'd used the full name, I would have been able to form a mental image of it (said image would've been completely wrong, as I was picturing a large Gatling-style weapon before the page image loaded), as it was I had to pause in my reading to look it up.
In contrast, this scene about the OmniWrench:
“Well, it looks like Rhunön is about to waste her Brightsteel on making Ratchet a new wrench,” Zeb said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “She only used that for making the riders’ swords, gah!”
“Not to mention the OmniWrench Millennium 12 is made from teratannium, not this magical star-steel claptrap.” Des groaned. Eragon decided that since there isn’t any Brightsteel, he and his party would just leave. “You have got to be ...ing kidding me. No Speshul steel so you just go? What about just reforging the damn thing?! An iron Wrench is better than nothing!”
“She used Brightsteel to make a hammer,” Zeb said faintly. “She used it to make a hammer.”
This dialogue gave a lot of useful bits of information, and it felt completely natural.
The charge scene was particularly nice, especially Des running in screaming like that. I also liked how both the agents and the canon characters were actually doing stuff during that scene, rather than it just being a big speech as the charges were read.
Nicely done.
- Irish
A few errors, though:
1) He pointed at a large man wearing a green spandex suit that was impaled on a steel rod. “That’s Captain Qwark, and he’s dead.”
So was the man impaled, or just the suit? As written, you're saying that the suit was previously impaled on a steel rod, and the man is now wearing a suit with a hole in it.
2) “If I managed to stay, so should have he… but never mind.”
Delete the "have"; it should simply be "so should he".
3) “Get her!” Des shouted, pointing at Rhunön, who was trying to run away. His distraction earned him an elbow in the belly; while he was catching his breath, Ratchet dove for his axe. He jumped on the Lombax and started pummelling him.
From the looks of this paragraph, there are three characters in this scene, all male: Des, Rhunön, and Ratchet.To whom, then, are all those "he"s referring? I ask because that last sentence cannot mean what it says: grammatically, its "he" refers to Ratchet, but that would mean that he jumped on himself!
1) Fixed.
2) Des-ism. Des talks weird. It stays.
3) Fixed. Rhunön is female, BTW.
Thanks for the FYI on Rhunön. As for Des, I don't recall him talking that weirdly before...
Well, basically, Des is not a native speaker (I'm ESL, too, but I get betas, so...), so he's bound to make some mistakes. Also, it's IC for him to speak weird for the hell of it.
Des looked Illirea before glancing at the Words again.
A word may be missing there.
HG
I don't know anything about Ratchet & Clank, but I have read the first three Inheritance books. (I know, I know, what was I thinking. The first one was good, then it went downhill.)
Really liked that mission! Ahaha, poor Rina...and Zeb...and Des...and pretty much every agent mentioned. Even the Librarian.
Really? But... he wasn't even in the mission...
Either way, glad you liked it. :)
So I felt sorry for him too. We must be inclusive.
He thinks all humans are simply inferior.
(Here, take a look at my spinoff; I think it will clarify the regrettable fact that the Librarian is, in fact, an a**hat.)
You mean we're not supposed to identify with the feeling that nearly all our colleagues are worthless fools that we hate being stuck with?
Because that's a feeling I know only too well from every job I've ever had...
The Librarian is not the Only Sane Man; he's, em, a very Smug Snake indeed. The Librarian is a jerk, plain and simple. He's haughty, he's sarcastic, he's full of himself, and he's certain that the Time Lords are superior to basically everything else.
Of course he thinks that Time Lords are superior to basically everyone else. We all think that whatever-we-are are superior to basically everyone else. It would be strange if we weren't. In life, unfortunately, there are rules that mean we're forced to be diplomatic and pretend we don't feel that way.
IBTW I'm not sure about thpse TV Tropes links. Ultimately, deep down, there's a lot of Smug Snake in all of us, even if most people don't like to admit it. :(
In life, unfortunately, there are rules that mean we're forced to be diplomatic and pretend we don't feel that way.
The kids at my school who made my life a living hell. They could get away with pretty much whatever they wanted, because the adults didn't give two craps to tell them otherwise.
Trip that freak in the halls?
Knock books out of her hands and kick them out of her reach?
Stalwartly ignore her when she has the gall to sit at your table? Or, better yet, move to a different table just to let her know how unacceptable she is?
Trap her on the playground and pin her down so they can dogpile and suffocate her?
Invite her to a birthday party to push her in the pool, laugh, and say to the adults she tripped and fell in?
Set her up on a date with her crush and bribe him to dump her the day before the dance?
"None of those unfortunate rules to tell us what to do, yay!"
Nice attitude to take. It'll endear you to a lot of people.
(*hugs*)
I went through pretty much everything that you did, and hated it just as much. That's one reason why now I want to be the one to have my turn making other people's life a living hell, to make other people suffer just like they all they made me suffer! You probably know the feeling too.
Unfortunately (that word again!) I'm too much of an honest, rule-abiding sort to do that. (I think the - very misleading - technical jargon is "right wing authoritarian personality type".) So as long as those rules remain in place, people like you and me will never get our chance to take our rightful revenge on the world, and the rule-breaking bullies will continue to make us suffer.
Still, at least we can dream, right? One day, one day...
Not to denigrate or delegitimize what suffering you had, but your next sentence puts them in a very different light:
"Now I want to be the one to have my turn making other people's life [sic] a living hell".
That's... well, it's nice to have goals, I suppose. Here's a suggestion for one, if you'll permit me to offer it.
Try - actually try - making it through sessions of cognitive therapy. You definitely need a course of that. You have anger issues. You want revenge on the people who made you suffer. I get that. I know what it feels like to have that gut-wrenching desire in the back of your head, telling you to prove you're better than they made you believe you were. It's quite likely at the root of my own issues with anger management, which you don't have to be a genius to figure out I possess (cf. my interactions with... at this point, half the Board, or so it seems).
I was made, by my peers at school and other people who shall remain nameless but really ought to have known better, to feel that my achievements were worth nothing, my positive attributes (such as they are) were in fact negative ones, my abilities were either pointless or inferior, and my ambitions laughable. I hate feeling like that. It burns in my brain like hellfire. I still seek to challenge people on stuff, assert my dominance, prove myself to be better at Thing X than Person Y. I still have revenge fantasies that go into the kind of terrifying detail that a giallo movie director would consider excessive. And I cannot stress the following enough:
THIS. IS. NOT. HEALTHY.
It's the same for you, it's the same for me. I am not in therapy because I can't afford it and I have a depressing tendency to lie like a rug to them. I wonder what your excuse is.
You were wronged by people, according to societal standards. We all have been. You must not dwell on it. Doing so will chew up your... not soul exactly, but the part of yourself that is your self, and after all the agony has been wrung from it, it will be spat back out, dripping with venom and rancid bile. I should never have let it happen to me, and I do not want it to happen to you.
Additionally, you have a correlation-causation error in your logic. If a person breaks a rule upon which society is by and large agreed, the rule is not (generally speaking) the problem. The person is. Doing away with the rules leads to no threat of punishment, which means a lot more people are going to start doing the things that you don't want them to do to you. And they will gang up on you, because humans are social animals and if you've managed to get Iximaz this riled up then heaven knows what you're like with non-PPC people, and they will destroy you, and there will not be a single solitary thing you can do about it, because hey, you get to do what you want too. You just lack the means. Ain't nobody's fault but your own. That is what anarchy entails - and while I realise that a pro-government democratic socialist may have some internal biases against anarchism, even Bakunin realised it was impossible in a society still bound by scarcity-based economic structures (which even now all societies are, even the anarchist communes that are scattered around the nastier parts of the globe).
Finally, you think your revenge is "rightful"? I beg to differ. I seriously do. No revenge is rightful, because you do not have a right to it. You have a right to justice. You have a right to due process. And so do they. This is why trial by jury is even a thing in the first place - to stop endless cycles of blood feuding and needless death. Which, again, is anarchical.
But hey, you don't have to listen to mean ol' Scapegrace. I'm just another of those people defending your kids. I'd be deeply shocked if you made it this far through the post, because you don't want to read it, and I think the reason that you don't want to read it is because you don't want to hear that your coping mechanisms are so fundamentally flawed you are making a leading member of an extraordinarily non-judgemental community tear her hair out in frustration at you. You don't want to hear that your bloodlust is wrong. So you won't hear it.
And you'll go back to your bunker with your collection of guns and your tinfoil bloody hat, waiting for the bombs to fall.
You worry me. You also repel me.
That's not justice, and it doesn't help anybody. That's vengeance and all it does is further increase the suffering. Rather than helping the victims, it just makes more. Not to mention that it doesn't really help you.
While I didn't go through what Ix went through (and I consider myself very, very lucky for it) I did meet a couple of really nasty people, and, while I hate them — those lone two persons of all the people I know — I do not wish them ill because it won't take back my suffering, as it were, it won't make them better people and prevent others from suffering, and it will hurt them. Vengeance is very much pointless and very much to the detriment of everybody.
It also means, as Voyd said, that they won. You're one of them now, in mind if not in action... is that what you want? More people like that?
Behold Bacterial Contamination. Warning right now for disturbing visuals and subject matter.
This is my favorite Vocaloid song, because of the visuals, the sound, and above all, its message. So, allow me to explain that message.
The song is about bullying. More specifically, it's from the perspective of the victim, and it uses bacteria as a metaphor.
The narrator, in a desperate attempt to deal with her frustration, turns to victimizing people herself, claiming to have "passed on her bacteria." It's implied that she eventually kills herself later.
The victim became a bully herself, no better than her tormenters.
That is what I'm hearing from you.
You've succumbed to the sickness.
I've not managed to "succumb" and actually become a bully myself. And I probably never will. Like I said, I always feel too bound by rules to actually do it.
But that shouldn't stop me feeling a jealous admiration for those lucky ones who do manage to achieve it.
I do not condone, nor do I believe it healthy. But I understand.
There is a reason "an eye for an eye" is a very popular form of punishment. Vengeance is a natural desire for almost all of us. There is a reason we have "good" and "bad" guys. We want to see the bad people get what they have been giving out, if not more. Make them see what they have been doing. Make them pay for their crimes. We are naturally violent creatures. For most of us, we want to lash out, deep down.
But this is wrong.
Wanting to give people a taste of their own medicine is not justice, it is just as wrong. Scapegrace put it best. I think it would be in your best interest to listen to her. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. It just perpetuates the cycle of violence.
This does not, however, mean you should be passive. There are ways to strengthen yourself and starve out aggressors without being aggressive yourself. If the acts against you are verbal in nature, don't let it get to you. I know, it is hard. Trust me, I know. But if you starve them of the emotional response they want, the verbal aggressors will let you go. And what they want is either sadness or anger. They want you to either hate yourself, or hate them. If you respond either way, they win. Know that you are loved. Know there are people who root for you. Know there are good people in the world, and you are one of them. Remember this, and the verbal attacks hurt less and less over time, until you can start to see the bull for what it is.
If you are being attacked physically, learn self defense. Anything will do, though martial arts is usually the best. And I don't mean do flip-kicks to stop bullies before they get to you. I mean, know how to dodge or take a punch. Know pressure points. Know how you can disable physical aggressors with minimal risk to yourself and them. I would say learn Krav Maga, but given your current emotional state, that might not be a good idea. Judo, Jujitsu, even Karate might give you the confidence boost you need. However, I have to insist: if you turn a defensive art into an aggressive one, you have failed. You have fallen to their level, and become part of the problem.
There is one last thing I would suggest. And what I am about to say may sound bad, but I want you to listen when I say it. Seek therapy. I know it sounds like I am saying you have a mental disorder. You do not. Vengeance is a natural response to have. But, natural as it may be, it is not the healthy one. Therapy has this stigma as being only for the mentally troubled. All therapy really is is having someone there to talk to and give solutions for your problems. Everyone has problems! Sometimes, we all need some help with our emotions. They are trained professionals in sorting out how you feel, and moving forward in a helpful way.
Listen to Scape. Listen to me. You are not a bad person for feeling this way. But you need to rise above it. Be the better person.
Your mindset is the same as theirs. Words can and do hurt people. You've hurt Ix. You've also hurt me, though - obviously! - not to the degree you've hurt her.
Do you understand what's going on here? Do you understand the impact your words have on people?
I can only compare it to a junior high kid "admiring" high school punks because they curse, drink beer in public, and do drugs.
And saying that you "probably will never become a bully" sounds to me like tempting the Ironic Overpower ;)
It's a ticking bomb. You never know when your trigger will be pulled. But when it starts, well... pop goes the weasel.
You are unbelievably wrong about everything you've just been talking about, because you are still in pain and lashing out at anything and everything. Even the people who are trying to help you. I've been there. I've gone through it. And the thing about wanting the people trying to help you to just leave you alone?
Sooner or later, that's exactly what you get. And I will never, ever, ever wish suffering alone on someone.
Not even you.
Yes, let's make other kids want to kill themselves because they think they're a freak and will never fit in, because there's something inherently wrong with them. That's just a wonderful stance to take.
It's people like you who perpetuate bullying. And that is not okay.
You (allegedly) know firsthand what it's like to suffer. And yet, you want to make others feel the same way, rather than make sure that sort of thing never happens again.
You disgust me.
...is people like you and me being too weak or too unwilling (or both, since it's the same thing really) to fight back and turn the tables on the bullies. If there were no more potential victims, the would bullies would have to stop.
OTOH if you say that people mustn't bully ever, then all that happens is that the sort of people who don't care about rules still go ahead and do it anyway.
What you describe is Hobbes' bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of everybody against everybody else. It's not a solution, it's the problem. It just perpetuates itself. If everybody's a bully, then everybody's a bully; there's just a pecking order of bullies with bigger bullies bullying smaller bullies who in turn bully people below them.
What you suggest is just more suffering. Why do you want that? It's not good for anybody, least of all for you.
Furthermore: You are hurting people. You've hurt Ix. Badly. D'you have any idea what you're doing here? I strongly recommend you to think your next post through, because you're walking on very thin ice here.
Expressing your desire to make people suffer is a clear sign of losing it. I don't want to sound harsh, or - Heavens forbid - make myself look like a cyber-bully but I honestly think something broke inside your mind, dear.
Are you familiar with a saying "violence gives birth to violence"? That's a universal truth; bullying won't stop if the victims start to torment their tormentors. Also, if you are not currenly are a victim, it will make you look like the thing you despise. I am no stranger to violence, but doing so just because "I was a victim once" makes you look like a D-list comic book villain.
From our conversations I thought of you as a reasonable lady. Please, don't try to take revenge for the past. Use your past, to live better future - not to re-live past in a different role.
This picture perfectly illustrates what I've thought of, when I heard your declaration of revenge
You do realize that you just told Iximaz and by extension other bullying victims that they are the reason they are being bullied, ie textbook victim blaming? No one is ever to blame for being attacked or bullied. And fighting back might not solve the issue. It could very easily lead to escalations, it could lead to the victim being punished themselves. Because, newsflash! People are irrational and messy and the world we live in is unfair and painful. That doesn't mean that causing someone else pain is the answer.
And believe me, I know exactly how much it sucks to be told that if you ignore it it'll go away! But just because ignoring bullying doesn't work doesn't mean that fighting back tooth and nail will have any better results.
I might not have yet learned to let the past go, but I don't want to perpetuate the cycle. You, on the other hand, are immature, twisted, and no better than the people you want to take 'revenge' on.
You don't sit around and do nothing because it won't change things in the long run. You stand up for what is right, because nobody else has the guts to do so. You take a stand, and you say no, because this sort of thing is not okay.
Imagine dreading waking up in the mornings because you're going to have to spend the rest of your day looking over your shoulder.
You pretend to be sick just so you don't have to go to school. And sometimes you don't have to pretend because you're so scared of what's in store for you that day you actually do throw up.
You lie in bed at night wondering what's wrong with you and if it's not better if you just took yourself out of the picture, because you're apparently making everyone else's existence miserable. Because why else would they so routinely and maliciously pick on you?
And then their taunts get into your head, and you start believing that you are a loser, you are a weirdo, you are a freak.
You have nightmares about the things they did to you, even years after you last saw them.
A couple of the girls actually did suggest I kill myself.
And then they all laughed like it was the best joke in the world.
This is who you want to be. This is what you want to make others feel.
You are no better than them. You are worse, because you have felt what that is like, and you want to spread it to others.
It wasn't because I was 'too weak' or 'unwilling' to fight back. That is a load of utter bullshit.
When you have the entire grade using you as their own personal chew toy, you don't have any witnesses to go to for help in backing you up. I would go to the adults, I would tell them what was going on. And they would either laugh it off as 'kids being kids' or, if they bothered to get off their butts to investigate, they wouldn't be able to find a single person who would validate what I was saying because it was funny to play with me like that.
The few times I fought back, like when I punched the girl who pushed me in the pool, or bit the kids who were dogpiling and suffocating me, or broke the nose of the boy who asked me out just to dump me for a laugh, I was the one who got punished for not being able to control my temper and handle things in a mature way.
So I was told over and over that it was my fault that I was getting this sort of treatment. And hearing it again, from you, really does not make me happy.
Don't you get it?
By thinking like that, your tormentors have won. You've become the monster, you've been contaminated.
I knew I should have encrypted it...
"I only seek the tender warmth of his... deliciously sinful body. That reserve is a mask, you know. Underneath is a torrid, terrifying melting-pot of forbidden passions."
---
The Notary couldn't keep the grin off her face as she typed it. She was beginning to understand the attraction to this "trolling" lark. She began to giggle. Then cackle. Then laugh, heartily and deeply and (for lifeforms of more conventional aesthetic tastes) ear-clawingly shrilly.
Wobbles walked into RC 1875, heard her roomie, saw her roomie, and walked right back out again.
Seriously, how'd they even let you into HQ? You're the sort of person that makes plants die and animals mutate into Dark Things wherever you go.
Yeesh.
Now please stop.
~Desdendelle
(PS: I do not wish to know you any more than I know you now, Notary. You are inferior. -The Librarian)
Unless Time Lord mating season is upon us. In which case I might look into taking all of you guys and locking you in a very small room indeed.
~Desdendelle
(PS: You fell? No wonder your brains are addled. -The Librarian)
I guess that so much bureaucracy made your brain shrivel. I am not actually suggesting that — gods above, that means sticking Rina and the Reader with you and the Librarian in a locked room. I might be silly but I am not cruel.
~Desdendelle
(I only promise one thing: to introduce you to Amris and notify him that you have a taste for the fine arts. -The Librarian)
I no longer feel sorry for him. But now I have more PPC-fic to read, so yay!
Or, am I wrong?
Here.
Ixi, might I have the Musu gif?
Also - now I remember her. Dora, I'm sorry!