The Old Hack

I am sorry. I am having a hard time seeing your arguments as anything other than victim blaming. You seem so eager to share responsibility around that you are effectively arguing that Tedd is to blame for being genderfluid and for being the recipient of transphobic abuse because he does not respond to it in a fashion that would help to defuse it. And as your own story shows -- a story I recognise, believe you me -- someone caught in that situation quite simply may lack the knowledge and support to respond in a more helpful manner.

The man has lived for a long time next to a river full of very large crocodiles. He is well aware that giant lizards are dangerous. Breathing fire is gilding the lily.

So, to translate directly: being bullied makes you irresponsible. I see.

You misunderstand me. I am not saying that Edward will necessarily fail to understand if confronted directly. I am saying that at this point Tedd has a great deal of justifications for his doubts that his father will understand. Tedd has been harmed, and once burned twice shy.

That is possible. Would Tedd at this stage trust him to do so? I doubt it. He would fear, and justifiably so, that Mr. Verres would instead consider it 'another symptom of something being wrong with that boy.'

In story time, Tedd has had maybe three or four days total to learn what he is, absorb it and cope with the shock. Are you really saying that this is enough time to prepare himself to go to the father he no longer trusts in this area and who has hurt him again and again?

What kind of ship would that be? A submarine?

Excuse me? A genderfluid teenager with NO reference for what it is they are experiencing, and it is THEIR fault that they cannot explain what is happening to them? I am sorry. I could not possibly disagree more strongly.

Certainly so. But while I agree with you in principle that one should not judge oneself solely in order to punish oneself, that is not what I have been doing. I have been taking a long hard look at my life and realised that the very culture I grew up in is immensely racist and that this has had its inevitable effect on me. I am now fighting this and I refuse to employ weasel words while doing so. And in fact, it has been an immensely powerful tool for me to make progress. I take pride in this progress rather than allowing guilt to bog me down. And in fact, I found that once I admitted to myself how wrong my old behaviors were -- why, then guilt disappeared altogether, replaced by an intense desire to do better. The opposite is more often the case, I am sad to say. I have met any number of people online who say "I am not really racist" while continuing to be so, the excuse being used to assuage the guilt they feel. Of course the man isn't aware that what he is doing is wrong! He loves his son and has time and again demonstrated the lengths he will go to to aid and defend his loved ones. He got himself fired through the intensity of his feelings when Nanase and Ellen were endangered by Abraham. He would never dream of deliberately hurting Tedd -- which makes it just that much more tragic when you think about the pain he is unwittingly piling on the son he loves more than anything else in this world. But he is nonetheless doing it. In this world, it is the results that ultimately count the most and good intentions in and of themselves are worth little when improperly guided. That is of course your privilege. I disagree strenuously with it, however. I have a long history of calling a shovel for a shovel and there are times for diplomacy and times for presenting hard facts. We are not dealing directly with Mr. Verres in person and even if we were, different people respond in different ways to information. Here and now, I stand by my choice of words. Mr. Verres is transphobic. That he cannot help himself is irrelevant when it comes to his actions and their consequences -- the pain inflicted on Tedd is not lessened by his lack of knowledge of the harm he is doing. When one is speaking of an injury, the intent behind inflicting it does not reduce the damage when it comes to the injury's effects and consequences. Tedd knows that his father is acting in a transphobic manner and as a consequence has lost trust in him. And this is truly tragic, but arguing about guilt or lack thereof will not in any way change Tedd's position and problems in this.

I understand your reluctance and sympathise with your desire to establish a demarcation. I simply do not agree with it. In part it is due to the way I judge myself: when I look back at my life, I can see clear patterns of how I have acted in ways variously racist, misogynistic, homophobic and ableist. And these behaviors were not due to ignorance alone. Much of them came from taught cultural behaviors and prejudices. I am working hard on them these days but simply knowing that they are wrong is not enough. Not only do I still slip up, I also have to constantly and actively watch for patterns of behavior I have never recognised before and sometimes only discover are harmful when someone victimised by them so informs me. Was I racist, back then? In fact, was I all of these things? To my mind, yes. Without question. Trying to soothe myself into thinking that it was 'just ignorance' becomes a mere justification for my own actions, a palliative for my conscience that tells me that what I did wasn't so bad. The problem is that my actions were that bad. Keeping that in mind gives me motivation to work hard on improving and always be on the lookout for backsliding. Therefore, yes. I judge Mr. Verres to be transphobic. This is not the same as saying that he is irredeemable. He is not, but it will take work from his side to overcome it and a lot of it. Trying to explain his behavior away as 'ignorance' is not enough: it assumes that simply informing him that what he is doing is wrong, and him understanding this, will be enough to set everything right. And it won't be. He has a lifetime of learned behavior to overcome, and he can't do that in a day or a week or even a year. It will be an ongoing process and it may take him the rest of his life. I certainly expect this to be the case as far as my own learned behaviors go.

Nonetheless. While I will concede the above, I have yet to be convinced that any of the mentioned characters have done anything like betray Mr. Verres' trust in them. The closest I have seen any of them come to that is Tedd who is deliberately withholding information about his own magic from his father -- and he has the massive provocation of his father's transphobia and numberless microaggressions against him.

Is this like the chickens in Oblivion who could witness you committing murder and report you to the guards?

I have for a while now been doing my best to support a friend of mine who has been struggling with cancer. His prognosis was never good but he has fought long and hard for his life. Unfortunately, the latest news is that it has metastasized and spread to several other places in his body. Needless to say, this does not bode well. *sighs*

Unfortunately, it is not always a three for three in the real world -- or for that matter, in games. I could certainly envision a gun you loot off some bandit or mook being in an atrocious state of maintenance, for example. What is that term, a Saturday Night Special? One of my own favourite comics about how to handle guns may be found in the first panel of this Grrl Power comic.

I have been accused of many, many foul things in my misspent life, but never of being noble.

When I played KotOR my character would barge into apartments with the families living there present and go, "Scuse me, coming through, saving the galaxy, you don't need this do you, thank you very much!" as I looted the places for valuables.

To be fair, this was the man who thought the St. Valentine's Day massacre was a perfectly normal and reasoned response to the policies of a competing business.

That in combination with her desire to differentiate herself from Elliot might well do it, yes.

Yes. In this case, it resulted in a regular poster here to name a snippet of a storyline "Trapped in the Basement." The actual numbers kind of make me consider that an overreaction. I might have thought less about it if he hadn't also been so negative about it and constantly complained about the 'abysmal pacing' it showed. *sighs*

Denial is a powerful thing and both Susan and Diane reacted reflexively with it when initially hearing of their possible double.

I still would like to see examples of Ellen, Nanase and Elliot actively violating that principle with malice aforethought rather than through teenage overconfidence and the pressure of circumstance. Until then, I personally will not accept the use of the verb 'betray.'

Well, that puts paid to Al Capone's claim that you can get more done with a kind word and a gun than you can get done with a kind word alone. o.o

Philip K. Dick is very hard to get around when it comes to science fiction. You could say that many of his ideas are ubiquitous.

'Betrayal' is nonetheless a far too strong word to employ. At what point did Mr. Verres exact a promise from them to never tell anyone else about magic? He has urged them to be careful, yes, but that is not quite the same thing.

That would certainly have contributed to lessening its cultural impact. Of course, not all countries are civilised enough to have their own Pharaoh. Or pyramid land schemes.