musculo vivicare

the problem with hatesex in MoE is this series somehow manages to avoid having a single pair of characters that mutually loathe each other on any level more intense / personal than “you are preventing me from getting what I want,” to the point where i’m not even 100% sure which pairing is supposed to be the “favored” hatesex ship. but if I had to wring hatesex out of this cast, the ships I would go for before I got to Cheris/Kujen include:

I think the "favored" hatesex ship is supposed to be Kujen/Jedao (it's probably the ship I've seen the most fic/art for, it has a lot of things going on but "hatesex" is in the, idk, vector space of dynamics).

however your ideas are FANTASTIC. your take on Tseya/Mikodez is nasty and inspired.

Mahar/Kujen doesn't HAVE to be complete crack. it's possible to write about characters having sex/physically fighting while sharing a body. I'm picturing a lot of focus on the struggle for control: if Mahar does something Kujen doesn't want him to, Kujen can forcibly wrest control away from him. Or if we want them in separate bodies, we could also set something in the period between when Mahar made the deal and when he actually BECAME Kujen's anchor. The hatred won't have had time to mature but I'm...picturing something. (disclaimer, I don't remember how old Mahar was when he actually became Kujen's anchor, or if there was a significant gap of time between the deal and the execution. iirc Mahar was 15-ish when they made the deal, which is Worryingly Young, but I do suspect that Kujen may have screwy ideas about what is too young to have sex/sell your life away/etc.)

okay yeah I did assume at first that he probably meant kujedao, I just don’t actually see them as a hatesex relationship at all and ended up second-guessing myself. like I would argue that Jedao basically never fucks Kujen because he hates Kujen so much as he fucks Kujen because he hates HIMSELF, which is, look, it’s different!! it is possible to have a toxic/abusive relationship that rarely or never veers into straightforward hatesex and i think kujedao are doing it!

also I am NOT trying to get into a ship war with The Fucking Author but "they're both into math" is NOT a sufficient basis for a compelling ship I'm sorry. (especially in a series that handwaves 99% of the actual math—it could work in something like the The Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan, which is basically bisexual drama slapped on the side of a giant physics problem (complimentary) but Machineries of Empire has more going on than that)

i should have fucking picked chemistry

my prof: don’t touch the underside of the tables, we dissect preserved rodents in here for mammalogy and they haven’t been cleaned in 3 or more years. custodians only clean this lab twice a year. if you break a specimen container we have to evacuate. that 3-foot box under the fume hood is full of dead birds. sign this waiver it’s 10% of your grade.

me, internally: i could have been a fucking meteorologist

how it feels to be a microbiologist walking into the animal biology lab:

7.2k into this nightmare of a 2nd person fic and the “what the fuck am I DOING” mood is starting to hit. giving me access to a word processor was a mistake. I wanted a quick little two-scene oneshot but it’s getting longer

cut a bunch of stuff. wrote a bunch of other stuff. net 0 wordcount change. everything is done except the sex scene which is the entire point of the oneshot but also I kinda don’t wanna do it? we will see.

working on this exclusively on breaks at work + in the middle of a health crisis + the fic concept itself is pretty gross = I have managed to associate a whole host of queasy feelings with this doc. 0/10, do not recommend this process

my sister’s cat is not a cuddler. She does not want you to pick her up, she is generally displeased by people sitting next to her on the couch or the bed, and she will rarely come snuggle with you normally. BUT. She is absolutely nuts for blanket forts. She LOVES blanket forts. She begs for people to make her blanket forts by pulling blankets off of the backs of couches and shelves. If you sit on an armchair and pull a blanket over your head and knees to make a cave, you will soon find a furry little diva shoving her way into your fort to sleep on your stomach. Sometimes if you dare to sit on a chair without a blanket she’ll come sit in front of the chair and meow at you judgmentally until you make a fort. she’s so weird and also so heavy

you make the couch experience much warmer and stuffier than it needs to be

ooogh thinking about psychiatry in the hexarchate now. psych surgery and formation instinct and the endless manipulation of Jedao in the Black Cradle. psychiatry as compliance training all the way through. We can take the crazy out of Jedao, but then he's not brilliant, and there's nothing to do about his suicidal urges other than Surgically Taking Out The Crazy. also we're going to trigger him on purpose to see if his anchor flinches.

and in the face of the total lack of institutional support, one of the strongest through-lines in the books is people coping with what they've been done and what's been done to them, and helping each other cope. Jedao remembering names. Kel Gized nearly breaking down the door to keep Jedao from killing himself. Mikodez advising Brezan to find a hobby and giving Jedao the green onion. Everyone figuring out how to keep going and get what they want, in the face of a psychological-care framework that is solely interested in upholding the systems that hurt them.

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

my original tags:

@invariant-ice:

He must have done something that was both purposeful & directly causal to their deaths, if not straightforwardly murder, because YEAH. I feel like mutilating his own conscience might not have necessarily changed how he thinks about things that happened prior: like, I don’t think that post-surgery he wrangled himself around to thinking things he considered himself responsible for beforehand weren’t actually his fault, I think he just didn’t feel bad about any of them anymore. But if it was an accident he most likely would have updated his perception of responsibility as an adult freed of guilt. but then like, what did he do???? and why??

the orphanage thing is actually from his journals. Revenant Gun, ch. 6:

This is also the chapter that we get the only other piece of information we know about his sister, which is that she was about 5-7yo when she died:

(btw, this means either he and his sister had a somewhat significant age gap or he was VERY small when it happened. TOO SMALL)

He does not actually give a specific age for how old he was during the Erchanno annexation, just that he was admitted to academy at fourteen. I think he probably tested out of the orphanage and into the academy dorms within a few months. Long enough to have been miserable, short enough that it wasn’t a huge part of his childhood / he doesn’t feel he was failed bureaucratically (cf. RG chapter 23, “The Kel were good about getting us into orphanages and arranging for our educations. I tested into Nirai Academy very young.”). This could put the date of annexation either early in his fourteenth year or late in his thirteenth.

YEAH literally what did he do and for what

one of the things that makes him interesting as a character is the abrupt shift in,, what shall we call it, his psychology? mentality? as an adult and a revenant his motivations usually boil down to ‘this is what I want and this is the most efficient/amusing way to get it’ but as a child?? ???

Halash is described as a warlord, a violent title. I can’t help but wonder if he was involved in some way

he seems like he was a very normal and sweet/altruistic kid aside from the trauma!! and then he made himself into THAT. men will literally do brain surgery on themselves rather than go to therapy.

the (horrible) possibilities I’ve managed to come up with, vaguely in order from most to least plausible: (CW: CSA, Kujen’s backstory)

textual support for your tags happens to coincide with an interesting note on Kujen's family:

(Revenant Gun)

we don't know about his family of origin but he may have 'fathered' one or more children around age 12 or 13!

Tbh my favored read is that he actually definitely did have children and is just downplaying the likelihood to Jedao, who has a soft spot for munchkins. Revenant Gun ch 18:

The only possible family member who could have provided descendant relations besides Kujen himself is his father, and there’s no fucking way he knows who his father is. On a meta level this is probably bullshit sci-fi fudging and not an instance of Kujen having kept good track of genealogy records over the years, but you can’t actually determine relatedness genetically after, what, thirty fucking generations? that’s just straight-up not how DNA inheritance works! so if you’re not assuming Magic DNA Testing the only way it’s possible to check is by paper trail. I kind of hc that he knew of or very strongly suspected the identity of those children and did, in fact, do his best to track them down as a teenager with slightly more resources at his disposal.

he’s so fucked up i love him so much 😩