Yes! Positive-sum poly-cules~, positive-sum poly-cules~ 🎵
*spin, spin, spin*
*hugs to stop from falling over*
Maybe my strong feelings on romance are kind of irrelevant since I'm aro and this is all backseat handholding, but
The entire way we talk about romance, the entire English vocabulary for romantic affection and sexual attraction and intimacy, terrifies me.
Because all of it is shot through with, with
with possessiveness. With a frankly really disturbing sort of objectification. With this ... utterly bizarre notion that love and violence are necessarily entangled.
Hmmm...is possessiveness such a bad thing, though? 🖤
...well, I
say that. But the possessiveness I speak of, that I take stock in, is something very different from the possessiveness that prior eras' notions of love - ultimately predicated on the treatment of women as property, mind you! - which is not something that requires violence to maintain, and not something done without the notion that the other person isn't loving every second of it...
Well, I'm only one woman, but I am very much
not aro. So from my perspective? Even if love is something to be shared, there's a certain burning passion in
desiring someone, and in placing them in a position to be loved by you, and the desire of another to be placed in that position...
It's not an exclusive thing, certainly, but there's still a little something to it...yet, still something that equally threatens the notion that women exist for the pleasures of men. 🖤
Hey,
that's a pretty good song, though! Not one of my absolute favorites, but it's on my Eternal Playlist for a reason.
...actually, thinking about it, the song is less about 'a battle for love' and more 'a battle to maintain love' and the fear of losing that love, or of burning passions dying or becoming too much. Maintaining love is a process in and of itself, and these fears certainly speak to me personally; that said, 'a fight over a girl' is a much broader use of the concept, so this is less me refuting the point and more just nerding out about music as per usual.
Mm, I don't know. But your assumptions tend to assume everyone's of a compatible gender and sexuality - and I can't help but think when you say these things, you're imagining a bunch of girls in such a position...well, I won't complain. That's the kind of world I dream of, too.~
"All's fair in love and war."
In this case, and I realize this might be slightly off topic, but: Alina Gray would totally say this. (But she's also kind of shit, although I also find that shittiness
attractive because lesbian villainess aesthetic - I mean, just look at
this very quest - but still.)
That said, she might also use a
different phrase...'l'amore domina senza regole', which translates to 'love rules without rules' - as is my understanding, this is a much more emphatically appropriate sentiment for you, for the idea of love having no rules or boundaries. 🖤
(Alina will still probably be shit even when she says that, though.)
Is there something about the idea of love-as-violence that people find attractive? Do romantic people all really want to get in some life-or-death struggle of the heart, with danger and sharp edges and dirty tricks and theft and bruising and bleeding, where the eventual winner has claimed their trophy by climbing over the corpses of everyone else? And do they fancy themselves the bloodied, bruised, murderous champion; or the helpless prize to be fought over, without agency of their own?
Hmmmmm. I mean, you're not
wrong, in the general sense, and well - a lot of romantic people do want some fucked-up things, frankly, as I've been through myself. I've done shit I'm not proud of, and had shit done in turn. Part of it just me not understanding what my feelings
were, but autism brain required a lot longer to figure such things out than other people, not to mention gender dysphoria severely getting in the way. (It's much easier to imagine someone loving 'Fiona' than the name I bore before, when I didn't know what I was.)
I will say, uh, polycules are not even
remotely immune to these things. Expanding polycules without getting everyone on board, claiming people as your beloved who don't
want to be, keeping a 'backup boyfriend' strung along when you really have no intentions on loving this person (yet feel such a need to control them that you say 'no, you're not' when that "boyfriend" starts to wonder if she's a girl), etcetera. So poly isn't really a cure-all and people can be pretty shit.
Even so, like, you're
right, right? It is all pretty fucked up!
That said...in this case, in Uchujo, with Nezha and Miri that is kind of what's going on, actually! Except, um, not really. Not at all, even remotely, when you actually think about it. But there's a
bit of a connection here that maybe might explain romantic fiction more? Or, actually, probably not, but it's kinda too late - I wrote it and dumped all my 🖤 onto the floor, so you're all going to read it!
Yes, the dimensions were and are a little less simplistic than just 'a battle for love' here in outer space, even if we remove the person who's now replacing Yuina Zartaj in this scenario. And, well, there's good reason for Nezha to
love being fought over...or for fighting to be something the 'ladies of the universe' love. 🖤 And, from a certain point of view, these women are
already in a relationship, more passionate than hope and deeper than despair...
Look at it this way.
Imagine you're someone whose power, supposedly, could single-handedly turn the tide of any battle. The tip of the spear. A weapon, honed and trained, and proud. But one who has no loyalty to those who have trained her, when she knows that there are people out there who have far more vision behind them than just continuing the same conflicts over and over...
Not one, but two. Two women, willing to give you a purpose you can
truly dedicate yourself to, beyond simply the status quo. Who want nothing more than to wrap you up in their creations, and use you as their weapon.
It's not an act of passivity or helplessness, of course. It's something Nezha chose - in fact, has
already chosen, has chosen as surely as she fell in love, even if she never realized either of those things yet.
You don't know it's 'love', you just know that when these women fight over you, your chest grows tight, and your cheeks grow hot, and you feel so
happy, and it just makes calling them 'Miss' all the easier...
And you inspire them, don't you? It's because of you that they're able to shine so radiantly. You, the shadow behind them, that pushes them onward. It's only natural to feel pride. To know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that family, that duty, that everything else means so little when you could reside within that shadow...
Competition drives them onward, so why not encourage it?
The situation is only a 'love triangle' because no one's thinking properly about it. Nezha doesn't have a stake in it. In fact, from
her perspective, she'd rather be trapped between the two forever. And these two, well...
Fighting one another, competing, pressing Nezha between them as a 'treasure', is what keeps them alive. Is what drives them further. That feeling of
hatred that they share is something neither can ever choose to give up. They would be incomplete without it, just as they would be incomplete without Nezha, and Nezha would be incomplete without them.
And if someone else should be jealous of such a thing, and desire to join it, to defy their place in birth, and eagerly use her talents to help create a new world alongside these 'ladies of the universe' as their fourth...well, that's just speculation, isn't it?
We could instead tell stories about people being people, together. About communication. About trying to understand one another. About adults acting like adults and trying to resolve romantic problems by talking to one another.
Short-circuit the damn triangle. Break the cycle. For the sake of all things warm and bright and fuzzy in this world, if you all care about each other, if you all could be happy together, at least try. At least try. Please.
And you know, maybe things don't work out. Love is complicated. Opening up to people is scary. Understanding people is difficult. Communication is inexact. Monoamory is a thing, even if I feel pretty strongly that it's not actually anywhere near as common as society claims.
Some people just don't work together. Sometimes, that won't be obvious until they try. There is uncertainty, there is risk, there is cause for fear and worry and anxiety; there is reason to wonder can this work out? There is room for feelings to be hurt; for mistakes to be made.
There is, in short, drama. A story does not suddenly become a primrose path, bereft of risk or uncertainty or tension just because the characters realize that love need not be a fight. It simply becomes a story where love is treated as something aspirational, something to live up to, something warm and precious and bright; instead of an awful, sharp, bloody thing, to be fought over and stolen.
...
...this has wandered rather far afield...
-just, I don't know. Doesn't that sound more interesting? Doesn't that sound nicer? More like the sort of life one would actually enjoy living?
I mean, it is. Why do you think I write it? 🖤
Like...the original version of this, in my mind, is something I'd really enjoy as a story, because it's the slow and twisted development of villainesses into forces that can meet the challenge of trying to take over a corrupt system deliberately designed to make people suffer. The creeping realization that their desire is something that cannot be contained, and weird science and passion, and Sapphic love, against the backdrop of politics and conflict, with rivals and enemies galore...
Writing a 'conventional' love triangle is boring, but...two women competing in terms of the pleasures they can bring, and awakening to the true nature of their love, all while their main object of affection gleefully enables them because she absolutely loves the attention and
cannot choose...that's something I think is a fair bit more satisfying.~
In that respect, yes, there
is the 'drama' you want. People trying to discover themselves, and when they do so, putting that to practice in the world. And the people trying to prevent them from reaching it. It's really kind of an interesting thing, to write a story by writing what happens when someone else tries to play through the story and changes it, and I think that's why I keep coming back to Uchujo in my mind even if it's had some, uh, popularity problems. Cough.
But, like I said. We can skip a lot of that, which conveniently puts us in a much better position to
survive this. Using energies more cooperatively from the start is a good thing, you know? I'm sure that 'rivalry' will still be an aspect of things, but in a more friendly fashion that involves explicit sharing of discoveries and coordinated manipulations from day one. This isn't simply the choice for the sake of love or passion, but
strategically as well - even if Fiona Zartaj doesn't realize this in-universe yet.
I will say this, of course: though things didn't work out well for Miri, Nezha, and the others in terms of the whole 'not having to flee to Earth because they couldn't change the world and prevent/win the Colony War' thing, well...the Miri of the present day is very clearly a lesbian and not the least bit averse to polyamory, so obviously even in the 'canon' timeline things worked out on that front
eventually. Nezha, of course, still has Miri even if she's otherwise in a rather poor state, and herself is not averse to such love. And, well...
It might be giving things away a
tiny bit, but let's just say Yuina Zartaj's "rivalry" with Miriaria Alphonse was ended in a way that she finds
extremely satisfying. 🖤 (That says nothing about what happened with the Colony War there, of course, but you know, love
did win in the end, right?)
Right, one more thing.
This is kind of a random aside but one of my favorite little bits of cultural witchiness is that Saint Walburga is a saint invoked for protection from witches; and so, naturally - well, no, probably no one ever actually did this, but my understanding is that the folklore goes like - on the night of the feast of Saint Walburga, Walpurgisnacht, witches and demons would gather on the Brocken to hold their own festival, Hexennacht, in protest. A sort of medieval anti-prom, if you will.
As someone who identifies rather more with witches than with 8th century saintesses, I do take a certain pleasure in knowing that Walpurgisnacht has been, to a rather large degree, usurped in the popular consciousness by that same witches' festival.
(I would feel a little bit bad for Walburga, but her feast day has, in the intervening centuries, been moved to the 25th of February. So everything's okay! She gets her feast day, the witches of central Germany get their party, and no schedules actually conflict any more.)
The reason I keep bringing Walpurgis up lately isn't just for the obvious reference, but because it (April 30) is actually my birthday! So it feels like an oddly appropriate thing to hang stuff around, especially 🖤 Fiona-esque things. This birthday, as a result, is also shared by Yuina Zartaj - and what a wonderful birthday present Miri got for Yuina! - and another character we know of from A Shadow Resides, Elias D. Metea.
Huh, that last one's kind of a coincidence. And Eli's from my neck of the woods too. Well, I'm sure it's nothing important.
I don't actually know why they have a gala ball at Walpurgisnacht in the Alphonse not-Versailles, let alone why there is a tradition of kissing under the moonlight there and then - the moonlight from what is inaccurately called 'the dark side of the Moon', which of course is lit fully from the dark side on Earth's new moon! - but just how closeted do you have to be to go, 'yes. this is where I want to confess that we'll be rivals and hate each other forever. this is a thing I should do and completely normal'?
Well, you know. Miri gets over it. Maybe a little
too much, in fact...🖤
Anyway. This arrangement is possible because the Alphonse cluster is located 'behind' the Moon, whereas the Zartaj cluster is located between the Moon and the Earth. This position is identical to that of Side 3, the location where the Principality of Zeon rose to power, justifying its existence as a fascistic violent power with the peaceful (if still extremely dubious) philosophies of 'Ere-ism' and 'contolism', as envisioned by Zeon Deikun, who the Zabi family, um, kinda murdered so they could take over, and rule in his name? Yeah, they're kinda pieces of work.
But yes, the Alphonse taking up this position in the stars? That was not a creative decision made in ignorance. The Five Families...are
not kind.
This'll be partly covered in the next science lesson, too, which
should be about the 'Earth Sphere' and Lagrange points, and will likely lead to me realizing I fucked up all the numbers of the Lagrange points again, which is a blunder not quite on the scale of the six-day weeks I accidentally created in a previous quest because I can't bloody
count.
