You're at a bar and you see a guy walk up to a girl and ask for her number. You've been watching both of them for a bit and the girl has a boyfriend who's in the bathroom, but the guy doesn't know that, and his friends have been egging him on to ask her out for five minutes and the guy is slightly drunk.
The girl politely declines to give him her number, and says she has a boyfriend. The guy proceeds to list off why he's better than some boyfriend he's sure she's making up just to get him to go away. Then the boyfriend walks up behind the guy hitting on his girlfriend and tells him to leave, but the first guy is too drunk for sense. So he hits the second guy in the chest, and the first guy hits him back, and then either it gets broken up or they keep beating each other depending on what kind of bar it is.
And you've seen the exact same exchange happen so often that you could probably recite each line by heart with only slight variations. The guy who's overconfident and thinks he's amazing, the girl who wants to just stick to her boyfriend, the boyfriend who's overprotective...
People can change, but it always feels like there's a tendency for people to fall into roles, and it's like you're watching the same plays over and over and there's just different actors who are reading the same script and the only differences are them putting slight personal touches on the characters. Different voices, different posture, but the same character.
its like people learn how to be people from other people i guess from the stories they tell each other about how theyre supposed to be and from movies and tv and music and shit like with the example you just gave how many fucking times does that exact scene play out within the first ten minutes of a feel good piece of celluloid americana so when youre the boyfriend and you see someone making your girl uncomfortable of course the first thing you think to do is play hero because thats what youve seen a million heroes do before you but after you get your shit utterly wrecked you just got to think im not the hero im not even A hero theres no such thing in real fuckin life but no one ever tells you how to live a real life they just give you story after story until you got no choice but to pick what handful of lame ass character tropes you want to die by and hope it wont suck too hard
And I have the distinct 'pleasure' of having part of my own life incorrectly retold over and over in a book that people take to be absolutely infallible. And people have made countless books and movies and plays and video games and everything including my story and they all get it wrong.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people talk about your own life and just cast you as some grand evil and not even consider that you might have had reasons for what you did.
[Don't even get him started on what the Mormons did to his story.]
I'd ask 'shouldn't you be going to bed about now?' but you're old enough to make your own decisions, aren't you?
All right. Settle in, I suppose.
In the old days, when the land was still green and fairly new, and the only people I knew of were my mother and father, we lived somewhat happily, if a little uneasily. I knew my parents had done something to offend God, but I did not know at the time. My parents were still somewhat like children - all they had known was the Garden of Eden, and the little they'd learned once they were cast out.
My mother had a baby boy, named Abel, and we grew up as close as you can imagine. I learned to take over the work of the fields, and Abel learned how to tend to the sheep. I sometimes saw what he did with the old sheep, how he culled them, and I knew that the plants I harvested no longer lived, but I did not connect that to the idea that the same could happen to people. How could I? I had never even heard of such a thing, and neither had my parents.
One day, God told both myself and Abel to prepare a tribute to Him. I selected my finest crops, carefully washed them so they would look their best, and placed them on the offering altar. Abel had killed one of his finest sheep and dressed it, but it was still bloody. This, evidently, was what He wanted. He had asked both of us for a sacrifice, but what He really wanted was blood. Blood does not run in crops, so He set me up to fail intentionally. He even had the nerve to ask me why I seemed upset, which as you probably know is never the way to make someone less upset.
... I had never felt anger like that before. It was all-consuming, and I was unable to calm it no matter what I did. So I invited my brother to walk through the fields with me, and I made a decision, fueled by that unnatural anger inside of me - anger that I came to realize later really was unnatural, stoked there by Him. I picked up a rock and killed my brother, there in the field. God could take my offering, because there was nothing else I could offer that was more precious to me than my own brother.
The fire died out after that, and I realized what I had done. I was ashamed, ashamed that I would let even anger manipulate me into something like that, and afraid, because I had never seen a dead person in my life. I hid him, and later God came to speak to me and asked me where my brother was. I lied, and said that I didn't know. Why was I supposed to keep track of everything he did? And God said that He could hear Abel's blood crying from the ground, and cursed me.
First, I was cursed to never be able to grow anything again. (And now you know why I don't have any grass-type Pokemon.) Then, He cursed me to be a wanderer forever. I said that anyone who found me would definitely kill me, so He said that he'd put a mark on me so that people knew they'd be cursed if they killed me.
I left home, and I eventually did find more people. I had a son named Enoch, and then I built the first city, also called Enoch. And I died when my house collapsed on me, and I learned that 'wanderer' didn't just mean that I was going to wander from place to place until I died. I woke up and I was born again, and when I was a few years old I started remembering my last life.
It took a few lives to realize that He meant I would wander through multiple lives, across the world, until the end of time. And when people started writing down what they were told was a true and accurate description of the stories that came before them, I realized that my story had been changed, and anything from my side had been taken out, because He wanted an example. I was the person people could point to and claim to be evil, to be blamed for things like murder and for people to see as something to be held up as 'do not be like this person'.
As for Abel... his soul was shattered when I killed him, and it was scattered amongst humanity. Various people inherited shards of his soul. I learned even later that Abel wasn't originally his own soul anyway - he was a split off portion of a demon called Bel that the one called 'God' defeated a long time ago. The demons called Abel the 'Bel of the Human World'. A human who has a shard of Abel in them has the potential to absorb the powers of another Bel demon if they defeat that demon - just as the other Bel demons would absorb the power of another Bel demon if they defeated them. In this way, Bel would become whole again, and become the King of Demons once more.
Of course... the fight for that was a long way off. And should any other Bel demon win, well... you can imagine the kind of ruler most demons would make. There's only one acceptable winner of that fight, for the sake of humanity.
[It takes a while for Dave to digest all of that, and he reads it a couple times. Parts of it make his chest all shaky.
'I picked up a rock and killed my brother, there in the field.'
He has to close his eyes and shake his head a few times to clear it of the dark blue of John's planet, of red blood drying brown against a white shirt. But the end of Naoya's story, that's something he thinks he understands. Something he can cling to.]
[It's strange, to say all of that, all at once, to someone who might possibly get it. To someone who might understand, or at least is trying to. Someone who genuinely seems to care, even if there's no way he can get all of it, because the human mind isn't built for this kind of thing.]
[It's enough to make Alice come over with some tea, and he insists that no, he's not about to cry, so there's a pause while he drinks the tea and ponders his response to those five words that Dave sent back.]
The Shomonkai - the group that worshiped Belberith - was the group that commissioned the program from me. I could tell that the War was going to happen soon because of various groups moving forward with plans I was keeping an eye on.
I won't pretend that I didn't have an interest in my cousin winning outside of not letting the whole planet become a hellscape. I still want to go after God. I still think there's a twisted kind of irony for God's favored child to be the one dealing the deathblow to Him.
But in a way, yes. I don't want humanity to have its free will stripped of it. Trying to force them into a narrow box and say "this is the only way you can behave" takes away everything that makes humans human. And that kind of world... while many of my lives have been largely boring, there's always something new that people come up with that can surprise even me. A world without that would just feel... empty, and stale, and boring, and just not human.
[Dave realizes he's shaking, reading Naoya's story. He gently removes a sleepy Eevee from his lap--"Vee?" "Shh, sorry, buddy."--and burrows down under the covers, pulls the quilt up over his head. It's better, somehow, to be completely covered, to have a thick buffer against everything outside of him and his 'Gear.
Also, if Karkat's awake, it means he can't see him freaking out. Or Dave can pretend to be asleep. Plausible deniability, hell yes.]
ok i understand
[As much as he can, anyway. As much as Dave understands anything, stripping it down to simple parts. Good and evil, death and life.
Naoya used his cousin (his brother, his little brother, for irony) for revenge, but also as a shield, for something as noble as the whole world. Dave has to believe that. He does believe that. And Abel, he must have understood that, too, if he chose to become something called the Messiah. No matter what Naoya says about that. He must have agreed that humanity was worth losing things to save.
He rubs his face with both hands, then picks up his 'Gear again. Okay. Okay. This is okay.]
i lived in a world like that where everything human was gone (you know on account of meteors) and youre right it blows
[At least what? What can he say to make this in any way sort of okay? He can't. There's nothing he can say. It's too complicated to just express in simple words.]
[... He's getting a headache. And this time it's not even really on account of memories, it's because of emotions, and Alice is there with a 'hand' on her trainer's head, stroking his hair and trying to soothe him.]
At least we have here. That's better than nothing.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
You're at a bar and you see a guy walk up to a girl and ask for her number. You've been watching both of them for a bit and the girl has a boyfriend who's in the bathroom, but the guy doesn't know that, and his friends have been egging him on to ask her out for five minutes and the guy is slightly drunk.
The girl politely declines to give him her number, and says she has a boyfriend. The guy proceeds to list off why he's better than some boyfriend he's sure she's making up just to get him to go away. Then the boyfriend walks up behind the guy hitting on his girlfriend and tells him to leave, but the first guy is too drunk for sense. So he hits the second guy in the chest, and the first guy hits him back, and then either it gets broken up or they keep beating each other depending on what kind of bar it is.
And you've seen the exact same exchange happen so often that you could probably recite each line by heart with only slight variations. The guy who's overconfident and thinks he's amazing, the girl who wants to just stick to her boyfriend, the boyfriend who's overprotective...
People can change, but it always feels like there's a tendency for people to fall into roles, and it's like you're watching the same plays over and over and there's just different actors who are reading the same script and the only differences are them putting slight personal touches on the characters. Different voices, different posture, but the same character.
[He's old.]
no subject
THINK i understand
its like
people learn how to be people from other people i guess
from the stories they tell each other about how theyre supposed to be and from movies and tv and music and shit
like with the example you just gave
how many fucking times does that exact scene play out within the first ten minutes of a feel good piece of celluloid americana
so when youre the boyfriend and you see someone making your girl uncomfortable of course the first thing you think to do is play hero because thats what youve seen a million heroes do before you
but after you get your shit utterly wrecked you just got to think
im not the hero
im not even A hero
theres no such thing in real fuckin life
but no one ever tells you how to live a real life they just give you story after story until you got no choice but to pick what handful of lame ass character tropes you want to die by and hope it wont suck too hard
no subject
And I have the distinct 'pleasure' of having part of my own life incorrectly retold over and over in a book that people take to be absolutely infallible. And people have made countless books and movies and plays and video games and everything including my story and they all get it wrong.
It's incredibly frustrating to see people talk about your own life and just cast you as some grand evil and not even consider that you might have had reasons for what you did.
[Don't even get him started on what the Mormons did to his story.]
no subject
do you want to talk about it
you already know im not too clear on the print version anyway
my minds practically unsullied
1/2
I'd ask 'shouldn't you be going to bed about now?' but you're old enough to make your own decisions, aren't you?
All right. Settle in, I suppose.
In the old days, when the land was still green and fairly new, and the only people I knew of were my mother and father, we lived somewhat happily, if a little uneasily. I knew my parents had done something to offend God, but I did not know at the time. My parents were still somewhat like children - all they had known was the Garden of Eden, and the little they'd learned once they were cast out.
My mother had a baby boy, named Abel, and we grew up as close as you can imagine. I learned to take over the work of the fields, and Abel learned how to tend to the sheep. I sometimes saw what he did with the old sheep, how he culled them, and I knew that the plants I harvested no longer lived, but I did not connect that to the idea that the same could happen to people. How could I? I had never even heard of such a thing, and neither had my parents.
One day, God told both myself and Abel to prepare a tribute to Him. I selected my finest crops, carefully washed them so they would look their best, and placed them on the offering altar. Abel had killed one of his finest sheep and dressed it, but it was still bloody. This, evidently, was what He wanted. He had asked both of us for a sacrifice, but what He really wanted was blood. Blood does not run in crops, so He set me up to fail intentionally. He even had the nerve to ask me why I seemed upset, which as you probably know is never the way to make someone less upset.
... I had never felt anger like that before. It was all-consuming, and I was unable to calm it no matter what I did. So I invited my brother to walk through the fields with me, and I made a decision, fueled by that unnatural anger inside of me - anger that I came to realize later really was unnatural, stoked there by Him. I picked up a rock and killed my brother, there in the field. God could take my offering, because there was nothing else I could offer that was more precious to me than my own brother.
The fire died out after that, and I realized what I had done. I was ashamed, ashamed that I would let even anger manipulate me into something like that, and afraid, because I had never seen a dead person in my life. I hid him, and later God came to speak to me and asked me where my brother was. I lied, and said that I didn't know. Why was I supposed to keep track of everything he did? And God said that He could hear Abel's blood crying from the ground, and cursed me.
First, I was cursed to never be able to grow anything again. (And now you know why I don't have any grass-type Pokemon.) Then, He cursed me to be a wanderer forever. I said that anyone who found me would definitely kill me, so He said that he'd put a mark on me so that people knew they'd be cursed if they killed me.
I left home, and I eventually did find more people. I had a son named Enoch, and then I built the first city, also called Enoch. And I died when my house collapsed on me, and I learned that 'wanderer' didn't just mean that I was going to wander from place to place until I died. I woke up and I was born again, and when I was a few years old I started remembering my last life.
2/2
As for Abel... his soul was shattered when I killed him, and it was scattered amongst humanity. Various people inherited shards of his soul. I learned even later that Abel wasn't originally his own soul anyway - he was a split off portion of a demon called Bel that the one called 'God' defeated a long time ago. The demons called Abel the 'Bel of the Human World'. A human who has a shard of Abel in them has the potential to absorb the powers of another Bel demon if they defeat that demon - just as the other Bel demons would absorb the power of another Bel demon if they defeated them. In this way, Bel would become whole again, and become the King of Demons once more.
Of course... the fight for that was a long way off. And should any other Bel demon win, well... you can imagine the kind of ruler most demons would make. There's only one acceptable winner of that fight, for the sake of humanity.
no subject
'I picked up a rock and killed my brother, there in the field.'
He has to close his eyes and shake his head a few times to clear it of the dark blue of John's planet, of red blood drying brown against a white shirt. But the end of Naoya's story, that's something he thinks he understands. Something he can cling to.]
you tried to save everybody
no subject
[It's enough to make Alice come over with some tea, and he insists that no, he's not about to cry, so there's a pause while he drinks the tea and ponders his response to those five words that Dave sent back.]
The Shomonkai - the group that worshiped Belberith - was the group that commissioned the program from me. I could tell that the War was going to happen soon because of various groups moving forward with plans I was keeping an eye on.
I won't pretend that I didn't have an interest in my cousin winning outside of not letting the whole planet become a hellscape. I still want to go after God. I still think there's a twisted kind of irony for God's favored child to be the one dealing the deathblow to Him.
But in a way, yes. I don't want humanity to have its free will stripped of it. Trying to force them into a narrow box and say "this is the only way you can behave" takes away everything that makes humans human. And that kind of world... while many of my lives have been largely boring, there's always something new that people come up with that can surprise even me. A world without that would just feel... empty, and stale, and boring, and just not human.
no subject
Also, if Karkat's awake, it means he can't see him freaking out. Or Dave can pretend to be asleep. Plausible deniability, hell yes.]
ok
i understand
[As much as he can, anyway. As much as Dave understands anything, stripping it down to simple parts. Good and evil, death and life.
Naoya used his cousin (his brother, his little brother, for irony) for revenge, but also as a shield, for something as noble as the whole world. Dave has to believe that. He does believe that. And Abel, he must have understood that, too, if he chose to become something called the Messiah. No matter what Naoya says about that. He must have agreed that humanity was worth losing things to save.
He rubs his face with both hands, then picks up his 'Gear again. Okay. Okay. This is okay.]
i lived in a world like that
where everything human was gone
(you know on account of meteors)
and youre right
it blows
no subject
[At least what? What can he say to make this in any way sort of okay? He can't. There's nothing he can say. It's too complicated to just express in simple words.]
[... He's getting a headache. And this time it's not even really on account of memories, it's because of emotions, and Alice is there with a 'hand' on her trainer's head, stroking his hair and trying to soothe him.]
At least we have here. That's better than nothing.
no subject
yeah
[Dave's glad he doesn't have to say the word aloud. He doesn't think he could without his voice breaking on it like the sea.]
its
its nice here
no subject
[Even if he knows the most he can hope for is about two hours before he breaks down and asks for one of his Pokemon to put him to sleep.]
no subject
alright
[Haha. As if. Dave's not going to sleep for a long, long time.]
good night dude
thanks for
you know telling me all that
it means a lot
no subject
It's been a while since someone actually wanted to hear it.
Good night, Dave.