I Certainly Didn’t Appreciate It On The First Read-through, But One Of The Biggest Background Characterizations

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍

alright this one is getting its own post instead of a reblog on a post that is Entirely Not About That. presenting the 'what if we put amy and alec in a room together' manifesto because the thing is that it is interesting but not in the way amy/alec shippers think

Amy shook her head, talking over her, “She’s always been emotional, passionate, unrestrained, and she’s channeling all this new emotion into hate, because it’s the closest equivalent.” “New emotion?” Regent asked.  “You mean you mindraped her.” Amy looked like she’d been slapped across the face.  I wasn’t surprised, but hearing it said out loud was unsettling.

“Nice,” Regent said.  “She could be a human-spider hybrid.  Add some insult to injury with the mindrape thing.” I could see Amy tense.

it is relevant to his character that he's the first person to cut through amy's euphemisms (and everyone else's avoidance of saying the unsettling part out loud) and outright say "you mindraped her." he calls the euphemistic language out and then intentionally repeats it a second time for no other reason than to bug her about it. it's vaguely reminiscent of something he says to sophia during his interlude:

“You and I are more alike than you’d suspect, I think,” he said. “We’re both arrogant assholes, yeah?  Difference is, I admit it, I don’t dress it up and tell myself that I’m a bitch and that that’s a good thing.”  He burned Emma’s face out of another photo.

he has a repeated habit of making people uncomfortable by calling something out for exactly what it is, whether it be "yeah sure cape groupies, my dad's girls, people i used my power on towards the end" or "you mean you mindraped her." he's desensitized enough to really all forms of violence to be unbothered by committing or witnessing them, but he seems to harbor a genuine pet peeve for people who obscure or unreasonably justify what they're actually doing. as uncomfortable as he can make taylor, it's often not that he's doing things worse than the other undersiders, but that he's the person most willing to openly admit what he's doing--or to pettily call out what someone else is doing.

i think it more or less boils down to the fact that he's never gotten to be the person on the peripherals of violence making up neat and tidy ways to talk about it: he spent his entire childhood being hurt in every way imaginable & being coerced into doing the same to others. i think it left him with a sort of genuine distaste for being expected to talk in circles around the viscerally awful things he had done to him or did to others, and subsequently, for people who have done similar things but can't fucking fess up to the reality of it. it's like he's been walking around his entire life just absolutely drenched in blood, witnessing so much else get covered in it, and he's starting to get legitimately bothered over people standing around twiddling their thumbs and pretending it's red paint. he knows it's blood. he's been tasting it since he was 6. he would really like if everyone else could also grow up and admit it's fucking blood.

it's always funny to me that amy/alec shipping is, like, a Thing--a niche thing, but a Thing, because i could not think of a rapist more hand-crafted to piss amy dallon off than alec vasil. he cannot go Three seconds in her presence without going "oh you raped her? you mean you raped her? with your mind? like she doesn't just have new feelings you specifically mean you mindraped her?"

she, on some level, views herself as someone who did harm because she's irrevocably, ontologically evil, and is sort of desperately obsessed with minimalizing or half-justifying her actions to herself so that she can avoid recognizing that she feels like she can't be better. she's clinging to the idea that she can be "redeemed" if she does something of equal measure in the opposite direction (e.g 'spending the rest of her life healing people' as she mentions), but because she can't even directly acknowledge how bad her actions actually were without crumbling under the weight of the idea that she's doomed to be that bad, she's fundamentally incapable of looking directly at what she did at this point in the story.

alec, on the other hand, is really fucking upfront and fairly objective about his actions--he never ties them into some Inarguable Truth About His Soul, and he's pretty honest about whether or not he thinks they're justifiable. in 14.1, he has this dialogue with cherie:

“When daddy had you practicing your powers, you ‘hijacked’ a few people at a time, used their bodies to get high with no consequences for you, you threw orgies for yourself…” “Again.  I was a kid.”

but despite the fact that sophia is, on some level, justified in his mind by his "eye for an eye, this is a favor for taylor" rhetoric--he's fine with admitting that he's also just doing it because, yeah, he's an arrogant asshole and he feels like it. some of it was because he was a kid being groomed, and some of it was because He Felt Like It.*

*sure, he only Felt Like It because he has a comically large cocktail of unpacked psychological issues--but he doesn't know that, he just knows he felt like it.

in other words, he doesn't subscribe to the idea that any of his actions are, like, Ontologically Predetermined By His Inner Being or even necessarily all related. he's like the fuckin' "might do it again, prolly not" dude from the sex offender shuffle. okay, sorry for saying that in my seriouspost. but his philosophies would clash hilariously badly with amy--he insists on accepting his own & others actions for exactly what they are, he's generally very invested in not being his father (being asked if he intends to turn out like his dad is one of the only times something briefly upsets him), and he's actually doing pretty okay at that. he's like...shockingly well-adjusted given the circumstances. his entire arc is more or less a slow upward climb.

i think having to be around someone who both believes and would outright admit "yeah i raped people, no i dunno if i feel that bad, no i'm not raking myself over the coals for it, yeah some of it was because i was a kid, yeah some of the other stuff wasn't, no i'm not Predestined To Suck," would like. clash with her beliefs abt 'ontologically evil' being a real thing, abt punishment as justice, etc. in a way that would really bother her. she spends a lot of her time in her head trying to twist things around until they feel salvageable to her, but alec is 0 amount concerned with rationalizing to make him feel alright--he just does things, some bad, most shitty attempts to be better.

it's, funnily enough, far more functional for improving than what amy has going on--he operates on material actions as opposed to her Self-Flagellating Thought Labyrinths, and the fact that he's busier moving on from things he can't materially change than he is kicking himself in the face means he can actually achieve some form of progress towards more functional approaches wrt human interaction. i think if amy had an extended conversation w/ him about the subject, she'd both be disgusted with him for not thinking thoughtcrime is real and deeply resentful that this fellow ontologically evil villain is doing better at moving forwards as a person than her despite not 24/7 flagellating himself + yearning for "redemption" like she is. it'd throw a disturbingly large wrench in her worldview, and she would not be happy about it.

oh, and alec would think she's weird and mopey and dumb and annoying and "why do it if you can't even admit it." and he would probably tell her as much. which is the point where i unlock the door to the room so alec can sprint out to escape amy's attempt to put tastebuds on his asshole.

i think part of the appeal of Dungeon Meshi to trans femmes is so many of us have this kinda like, martyr complex? and to see a story where a character sacrifices herself and instead of the other characters going "oh how wonderful of her, we'll remember her for her noble sacrifice!" they go "nope, we're undoing that, we are doing whatever it takes to bring her back" is just

yeah

Too bad the prophet Cassandra never met Odysseus

Visual development for Treasure Planet (2002) by Michael Spooner

As many have said he's a nerdy awkward loser with a bit of a crush on Taylor and more enthusiasm than sense, or empathy, or intelligence.

Which describes most spacebattlers.

Like he has little in the way of chararization beyond being like that so he's easy to project on, and easy to write for (write what you know and all that).

In a cast of people who atleast have refernece to haveing deeper problems and personalities, his greatest struggle is that he's bad at social shit. So he makes for a good everyman protag to throw in the deep end.

Like, I am a spacebattler, I got my start in the worm fandom on spacebattles and its offshoots, but there's so much on those sites that just baffle me to no end.

we need to take greg veder away from spacebattles and anyone who writes fanfic

"and how did you deal with the realization that human lives are much shorter than elf lives"

Frieren: well it was a very difficult experience for me when I lost a human who was dear to me but it taught me to value the time we have together and helped me become a more sociable person

Marcille: I WILL MAKE A DEAL WITH A DEMON TO SAVE MY WIFE

you're a loser, baby, a loser, goddamn baby

leaning on counter. for more 'how the fuck have i never seen/thought of this before' alecposts check my #alec essays tag. but yeah the character analysis on wormblr rocks it's good and fun here ♥

welp off to the alec essays I go!

Much like how old slasher flicks made it clear you could enjoy watching teens getting slashed by having them slut it up premaritally, Worm makes it clear you can enjoy watching the Travellers suffer by showing them play League of Legends