Intro

For reasons this subject has recently become very relevant to me. I would like to discuss the nature of parental abuse through the lens of Dnd so that… our dnd games will be more realistic and emotionally cathartic. It's a pretty thin veil over what I'm actually talking about so those unfamiliar with Dnd will find this perfectly understandable. As your cptsd buddy who gets it, this is your literal trigger warning before choosing to continue and I don’t want to hear any crap about it from anyone who doesn’t know why it’s necessary to include this sentence. Without further ado, these are my tips and guidelines for understanding how to run a player character who has an evil-aligned parent who left them with cptsd:

Terms

Abuse, neglect, and exploitation are the tools of evil-aligned parents, but there are differences in manifestation of these tools whether the parent is chaotic evil, a demon, or lawful evil, a devil. The evil carried out by demon or devil parents has similar effects on the victim (feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, unresolved latent rage, depression, unrelenting stress, suicidality, etc.).

• Abuse is inappropriate treatment of an individual. It includes physical, psychological, emotional and sexual abuse.

• Neglect is the refusal or failure of a caregiver to provide for the needs of a child or vulnerable adult.

• Exploitation is taking improper advantage of an individual. It can involve finances, material, labor or activity.

Demon Parents

The destruction of the demon parent is obvious to most people and this is the kind of parent who is commonly described as a “monster.” The demon parent behaves like an unpredictable greedy animal who takes what they wish from their family as they please, including the satisfaction of their suffering. They disregard all ethics and morality in the pursuit of physical pleasure that they can never quite satisfy. The anger of feeling this lacking is relieved by using family members for target practice. Everyone in the family is consciously afraid of the demon parent because the demon parent will do whatever they want to vulnerable people to fulfill their sick desires without reservations or justification. The needs of others can not be conceived of by individuals depraved in this way and they use threats to coerce others into behaviors which benefit the demon. Demon parents, when discovered, receive deserved universal condemnation and in many cases criminal punishment.

• Abuse: Physically harm family members at any time for any reason.

• Neglect: Family focused on keeping demon parent placid, wouldn’t dream of provoking the demon-parent with expressions of need.

• Exploitation: Demon parent makes demands and use violence or the threat of violence to coerce their victims into performing services for them.

Devil Parents

Devil parents are most interested in conducting their evil within the bounds of established rules or through the arbitrary interpretation of those sometimes recently invented rules. Although their methods are different than the demon parent’s, the desire to exert control and be served is the same regardless of the kind of evil methods the parents employ. While demon parents’ chaotic nature prevents them from fully integrating into society or holding any kind of wealth or power therein, devil parents are experts in manipulation and exploitation who often find themselves in positions of leadership in society, equipping them with servants to use against their victims. They can convince a person who they are abusing and exploiting to be thankful for being tolerated. Their specialty is for their victims and onlookers to view their abuse as fair, justified, or mundane because individual incidents appear, especially to the victim, to be non-abuse as the abuse isn’t demonic in nature. The devil makes their victims feel indebted to them so that they continue to serve. Family members are used up until they are totally consumed, which frustrates the devil parent because they demand to be served regardless of the mental or physical condition of their victims, so they shame their victims to work through any amount of pain or disability. Their victims, conditioned by their own parent to believe that this is a natural parent-child relationship, is ashamed of the anger and frustration they feel and learn to suppress their ideas, their desires, and their emotions because all could be used as tools by the devil parent to demean and shame. Devil parents, when discovered, become attractive to potential victims and repulsive but acceptable to most healthy people who do not understand the nature of psychological torment as they have never experienced it, who don’t believe in psychology altogether, or are themselves openly practicing devil-parents as the techniques of devil parents are often celebrated in conservative circles. Shame and plausible deniability keeps victims from admitting that they could have been abused.

• Abuse: Devil parent will systematically deconstruct the egos of their victims so that they believe they are less than human therefore needing to work to earn their place in the family which is framed as a refuge from a society which is even less accepting (which appears to the victim to be true because cptsd victims of any kind of evil-aligned parent were deprived of the skills they needed to be taught to have healthy relationships of any kind). They will punish failure and accept any amount of success neutrally as if it were the minimum possible standard. Demean and shame family members to enforce hierarchy that children exist to serve their parents and be thankful their parents allow them to live. Anything to shatter confidence and self-respect is on the table unless some rule forbids it.

• Neglect: React to expressions of need or emotions with shaming and condemnation. Make victims feel embarrassed for having physical and emotional needs from their parent. Criticize the lacking nature of the child’s self-taught attempts to take care of themselves so that they feel incompetent and worthless. Ignore health problems caused by neglect, convince victims they are not having health problems since they weren’t neglected. Tell the victim they are not experiencing the emotions they are experiencing and by faking them are not living up to their obligations to the devil parent. Children of devil parents view death as a welcome retirement from the required service of their devil parent’s domain which would be selfish to indulge in while the parent “needs them”, and feel guilty for wanting to die despite having a such an extraordinary and “loving” devil-parent.

• Exploitation: The Devil’s primary purpose is to enthrall their victims, family and beyond. They believe others to be opportunities or obstacles. They will use systemic psychological torment techniques (which they likely learned from their own devil parents and chose to perpetuate) to make their victims feel that their only purpose is to serve the devil parent and be ashamed by any thought that is not oriented to benefiting the devil parent.

Neutrally Evil Parents

It is also possible for a parent to be aligned neutral-evil and have a mix of the above distinguishing characteristics, as a parent my PC is familiar with. The neutral evil parent is a resentful ticking timebomb who will perform their evil lawfully when calm and chaotically when enraged.

Roll a d4

• Evens the neutral evil parent is calm and practices evil lawfully, use devil guidelines.

• Odds the neutral evil parent is enraged and practices evil chaotically, use demon guidelines.

PC Background Skills

PCs with cptsd, while debuffed from a panicked and disorderly survival mind, do have some unique abilities. PCs with Cptsd have an inflated perception skill because for their own safety they learned to never stop scanning their environment for potential threats ever. They tend to be excellent at identifying others by the sound of their footsteps and are themselves gifted at stealth and deception. They have skill in insight due to constantly monitoring the emotional state of the evil parent so they can hide when they identify the evil parent is becoming dangerous. PCs may have some skill in nature, survival, and medicine due to the practical experience of having to figure out how to care for themselves as children.

Depending on the nature of the abuse and the personality of the Player character, the PC could attain the Narcissist or Sociopath attributes. Unlimited ego from oneself and a disregard for all others may allow one to survive a chaotic and deprived environment, however applying this solution will shift the PC's alignment to evil.

Conclusion

Hopefully someone will get some use out of this… for their Dnd game. For anyone who has a player character who feels nothing but pain and knows their loving parents are related to that somehow but feel too guilty to explore that emotion, have your player character explore and radically accept the validity of that emotion in a controlled environment. The character will feel more acute emotional pain than they ever had before because it had accumulated over a lifetime and the body keeps the score, but the character will feel some relief from the constant ambient pain which had to be suppressed before. When they accept their own emotions and their own inherent worth, they can re-contextualize their experiences, learn the skills they were deprived of, and go on to lead a happy and fulfilling life at any age. That’s what I’m hoping for my PC. I'd like to hear from anyone who has a personal interest in this topic. For characterization purposes, do you think a PC in these circumstances might forgive their evil parent since they came from an evil background they are incapable of overcoming or condemn their evil parent for never being critical about how their behavior affects themselves and others in their entire life?

>“What has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes displaced for the second, third or fourth time,” Harris said. “We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering. And I will not be silent.”

Speaks for itself. We've been beyond satire for a long time but this one still got me.

The reason I choose to continue living is that I only have one chance to inhabit a mortal body in this world so I’d like to see it through for as long as I can. What’s yours?

In a nation which has the highest percentage of its citizens imprisoned in the world, Louisiana is the state with the highest percentage of its citizens imprisoned in the country. This is the exact wrong direction.

I voted for Biden in 2020. This was despite the fact that he is one of the main architects of modern American slavery through his crime bill which made the US the nation with the highest proportion of its own citizens imprisoned by far, who are quite literally slaves according to our constitution. This was despite him participating in the lies which caused us to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis in our pursuit of blowing up Halliburton’s stock value and taking control of large parts of the oil trade. This was despite his support of the neoliberal consensus which has lead to the deterioration of the economic, social, and physical health of the average American while the wealthiest’s share of the economy continues to grow meaninglessly. In fact, it was relatively easy for me to vote for Biden because the person he was running against was Trump who demonstrated worse tendencies on all of the above (while actually softening some prison laws, still fostered the increased social acceptability of acting according to blatant racism so I can’t even give him credit here) and more. According to my utilitarian principles, the evil choice I made was morally superior to the evil choice I did not make. Recent events have me re-considering this motivation.

To be clear, my opinion of Trump has not changed. Under Trump, I am sure I will be more likely to lose my loved ones or even my own life, although I am personally less at risk than his main targets. I am also sure that his influence would at least maintain if not increase the atrocities committed by the Likud-lead Isreali government with whom he has a strong relationship. Christian Nationalism is extraordinarily dangerous and if some of their desires are pushed through there’s really no telling the extent of future horrors we may have to deal with. If Project 2025 has a certain degree of success we may consider any pretense of democracy to be nullified. If I were only considering the immediate consequences of my decision, I would still support Genocide Joe.

I phrased that last sentence like that intentionally and it is the inspiration for this essay. The lesser of two evils in this case is now facilitating a genocide and I think that’s significant. In 2020 I didn’t think I had a red line which would cause me to allow a greater evil, and within the last few months I’m coming to find that I do have a red line I have to consider in and of itself and that line is genocide.

This is what I find particularly frustrating when I try to engage this topic in good faith, even among Biden supporters who are lucid about recognizing what is clearly happening before their eyes with their implicit support. Yes, they tell me, there is a lot they don’t like about Biden but he is the better choice. There is some equivalence implied here. Biden is guilty of a lot of things like union busting, failure to support a public option despite promises, the continuation of many unfair border policies, and oh yeah genocide too. I really want to emphasize that we are talking about the categorization and systematic elimination of a group of people from their homes which could not be happening as it is now happening without the economic and political support of the Biden administration. This is now among the issues we are telling Democrats we are ok with or not ok with via the use of the only political currency left to us being our votes.

“Vote Blue No Matter Who” is a phrase that made me sick the first time I heard it and I have only grown to detest it more, especially since I acted according to it it through my actions in 2020. Recently I realized that this is less of a call to action and more of a threat. More explicitly, this phrase can be understood as “Vote for our candidate or the Republicans will fuck you up.” We better pay up or they can’t be responsible for what happens to us. Like other organizations who make threats like this, by paying up we are supporting them in what they do even if it’s under duress. As long as their heavy, the Republican party, is out there fucking people up the Democrats have license do anything as long as it’s not as bad. The DNC made a hard right-wing shift with Clinton and have been moving right since then, just not as far as the Republicans have. This is where damage control has gotten us. Democrats have pushed through so many boundaries and now we’re at genocide. Now the promise is, “You better support our genocide, or the Republicans will make it worse and fuck you up too.”

What is going to happen if we tell the Democrats that even though they are facilitating a genocide, we’re still going to pay up? What is the message the DNC will read from that? What precedent is going to be set? Are we going to be safer now that genocide will be seen as something we can compromise on? Do we really believe that Trump is the worst threat they can make, or that the lesser of two evils couldn’t eventually be worse than Trump? Do we really think by making this compromise here, on top of all the compromises we’ve made over the last few decades, that after this time everything will suddenly change and we can start talking about making average peoples’ lives better for once?

I can’t responsibly ask these questions without recognizing that the threat is very real. I am not an accelerationist and I do not desire the further deterioration of our society in hopes of a positive outcome through violent revolution. I do not want to have to risk imprisonment and death to resist government persecution. I recognize that a breakdown of democracy and subsequent shift to political violence would only advantage those most equipped for and skilled in the use of violence, whose society of nails would be governed by hammers.

It seems to me that failing to support the Democrats this cycle puts us at greater immediate risk of the above, and that is shocking enough to bring most reasonable people under control. The thing is though, I think that by leaving genocide on the table for anyone across the Overton window of elected officials to consider as a socially acceptable tool is a far greater risk in the long term.

I think that by making genocide just another issue of managing how much we can tolerate among the two sides, making it something that is tolerable under some circumstances, or especially encouraging the thinking that the charge of genocide is conditional on the political expediency of it victims, we are ultimately normalizing the general idea that genocide is an acceptable tool for elected officials across our “political spectrum” of right wing and big tent(right wing, centrist, some left wing) to support or even employ in the worst case as long as they call it something else regardless of international law. If this is ok, what is the next boundary the Democrats will push? I want to stop digging the hole we’re in now, suffer the consequences, and deal with Democrats who at least understand they will not get elected if they facilitate genocide. Honestly I’d like one day to not have to make the least evil choice and have the opportunity to support something after the DNC primary, and it doesn’t seem like damage control is leading us in that direction at all but away from it.

In practical immediate terms, Trump is hated outside of his base and has demonstrated that his endorsement is poison to politicians who are not himself more often than not. He is dangerous, but inspires so much more opposition to himself and his ideas than any other candidate I can think of. I even think that Trump’s genocide is going to be received very differently than Biden’s genocide since Trump will be far less tactful and far more honest about his motivations. The worst case scenario is possible under Trump and I don’t think it’s ok to dismiss that, but it is by no means a guarantee that Trump is the one to lead average Americans into fascism. It is a fucking frightening risk allowing a greater evil through inaction, but I think it’s the actual least bad option this time.

I’m open to being challenged on or discuss anything I’ve said here in good faith. I’m also open to rage-induced teardowns of the ideas I’ve proposed here as long as those teardowns are against my ideas and not against me as a person or others who are sympathetic to these ideas. I understand that this is an extremely charged topic and would like to encourage honest conversation as long as it doesn’t bleed into abuse which won't help anyone.

Edit: Whew, that was some important discussion. I hope it was clear that my intention was to clarify my thinking and explore different perspectives on my argument rather than me judging others for coming to different conclusions or trying to convince everyone I am sure I am absolutely correct. Importantly, I realized this entire argument is secondary. What is important now is direct action. Depending on the degree of success we have with disrupting this sick order, this whole conversation could become moot and that is my strongest desire. See y'all on the street.

>Today, I am planning to engage in an extreme act of protest against the genocide of the Palestinian people

>Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.

>I will no longer be complicit in genocide. I’m about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers, it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.

>Free Palestine

This story is breaking within the hour I'm posting it.

Here is a pdf of the ICJ's Order of 26 January 2024.

For convenience, I will list the provisional orders below edited for ease of readability:

(1) The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention, in particular:

• (a) killing members of the group;
• (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c ) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and
• (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(2) The State of Israel shall ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any acts described in point 1 above;

(3)The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;

(4) The State of Israel shall take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip;

(5) The State of Israel shall take effective measures to prevent the destruction and ensure the preservation of evidence related to allegations of acts within the scope of Article II and Article III of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide against members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;

(6) The State of Israel shall submit a report to the Court on all measures taken to give effect to this Order within one month as from the date of this Order.

This is a fascinating survey of the political realities of contemporary Israel from the perspective of an Israeli leftist. Although I don't endorse every view expressed by the author I do consider this piece to be an excellent tool to understand the internal political influences pushing and pulling in Israel right now.

Please be skeptical of the claims made in this article. This was posted for purposes of cultural insight

🍉🍉🍉

I'm drunk. My partner deleted what I originally wrote. It was about how fallible we humans are to put it nicely. Regardless of our failings which we know we have, I really wish y'all as great a 2024 as we can manage. At the very least I hope we can have a better year. I won't be forgetting any auld acquaintances. Have a good time in 2024. Bee cool.

Step 1: Add a little bit of oil to taste.

Done.

Take your crappy canned soup and toss in a bit of butter, olive oil, or regular vegetable oil. Sprinkle some sesame oil into your homemade ramen. This is basically the single most important difference between the soup which traumatized you as a child and the inexplicably edible soup you get from restaurants.

Don't suffer through fall and winter. Soup can be a lazy convenience meal you which can taste good without a lot of effort.

>Inspiration strikes! Your muse has finally appeared and blessed you with a story, fully formed! It's so vivid in your mind. It's engaging, impactful, expressive, and beautiful. All you need to do now is put pen to paper and move it from nine o'clock to three o'clock.

>You look at the blank document and suddenly anxiety floods you. Where to begin? How to begin? You write out a few sentences hoping to echo the grandiosity of what you have in mind. They suck. Obviously. These pathetic sentences are unbecoming of the story you have in mind. You crumple the page and toss it aside.

>Clearly, you think, this is a story so deep that it requires intricate planning. You grab a second page and now your ideas flow out. A governmental system here, a character dynamic there, even a summary of the ending chapter. Now you have traction! This must be the way!

>Weeks later, you have a binder of disjointed notes and not one page of story. The project has expanded exponentially and your expectations for yourself have risen accordingly. The story is essentially flawless, and it's yours. Why the hell can't you write it then!?

>Cliche, trite, messy, plain, boring, inconsistent, unreadable. That's what those few paragraphs you've managed to get down have been. The shocking disparity between how the story goes in your mind and this childish attempt at storytelling is causing massive cognitive dissonance. Now when you look at the page with every intention to give it another try, you know whatever you end up with is going to be crap. Screw it. You decide to keep worldbuilding and hope that one day your plan will be so perfect the story will come naturally. Maybe.

This has been a dramatization of why I stopped writing for almost a decade and I'm sure I'm not the only one who has experienced this trap. This is called perfectionism which has affected me in other ways as well. I'm still very miffed that this tendency of mine kept me from engaging in one of my favorite activities for so long. Fortunately I've finally accepted that the reason my writing hasn't been up to my own standards was that I haven't been honing my craft. That was it. Simple.

I'm now no longer embarrassed by what I write, just a little embarrassed that I stopped myself from engaging in the art for what in hindsight seem like very silly reasons. I still write many things that I'm not satisfied with and probably always will. Instead of regarding this as somehow a personal failure, I can now ask myself why I'm not satisfied with it. The answers to my own questions here have informed the direction I take my writing stylistically and conceptually. I discovered that it was not actually a problem that my prose looks vastly different than that of many of my favorite authors. I'm not them and I'm not doing the same thing that they are doing even though we're all technically writing. I used to regard writing as somehow needing to conform to the proper academic style such as the neoclassical paradigm of the plastic arts in eighteenth century France, but in reality there isn't one aside from basic standards of formatting and readability (which are not hard rules themselves if you know them well enough to subvert them).

The most powerful thing however is that I'm now writing only because I want to do it, and practicing writing only because I want a better story to read from myself. The only way to be a better writer is to write, and the only way I can write is if I want to do it. When you really care about what you're writing you can see its potential through the mess of your initial attempts and you have the opportunity to bring it closer to your vision, or in my case, go in a completely different direction from the original idea. It really is what you make of it.

Whether it's a few hundred words or a few thousand, any amount of writing of any kind is better than no writing of any kind. The epic can wait. Until then you can write episodes, short stories, essays on topics you're interested in, and whatever else your fleeting desires pop into your mind. Even writing comments on Beehaw is something. If you want to write, write!

I've been writing much more consistently over the last few years after a years-long hiatus starting in college. Basically, I dropped all my useless expectations of what my writing should be and started to pay a lot more attention to my own writing sensibilities. I've been leaning into the way I like to write without regard to anything else. I have a career elsewhere which I'd like to stay in so the only audience I have to care about is myself so I can go as niche as I want.

Here are some of my quirks:

• My descriptions tend to be functional or absent. I will describe features of characters and settings only as necessary and leave to the imagination whatever I can. This keeps the action and dialogue moving at breakneck pace.

• While editing, when I think something is too explicit I often make it more vague. For example, a character might describe how and why a problem is happening and I will change it so that they are only mentioning their experience of the problem and obfuscating things they wouldn't want to emphasize.

• I'll write pages of notes detailing some system or concept only to hint at it briefly in the narrative. This is to imply consistency while being relevant and fast. Also, mystery is fun.

• I spend a loooot of time re-reading and adjusting the last few thousand words. I wrote it specifically so I would like it, so it's a lot of fun to go back and make it so I like it more. I enjoy editing as much as writing.

• I cut a lot of material when it's not working for me or if it starts to clutter things up. Whenever I cut something, I put it on a separate document. Sometimes I find somewhere else to insert it where it would make more sense. Sometimes I note why I deleted it to give me an idea of what I want instead.

• I love stealing from history. Characters, concepts, social constructs, belief systems, politics, etc. It's all there free to take and adapt.

• I make up a lot of stuff on the spot, then go back and add it in so it seems like I planned ro include it from the beginning.

• My outline is only a suggestion.

What are your quirks?