Mrs. Fallis had, allegedly, been dissuaded from pursuing a JD due to cold feet. She had ended up lucking into this position after her undergrad through the particular good will of her cousin, who so happened to be Mangrove admin. Rumor had it, anyhow. Nobody knew for sure, but if it was true it adeptly explained the upperclassman grade English teacher's penchant for integrating current events and politics into the study of the numerous writings of old dead white people who were usually men.
She ran her class with a focus on proper forum and debate, in pursuit of teaching students to gather evidence and think critically. In her AP classes in particular that was her way of preparing students for the necessity of quickly formulating reasonable positions with three to five pieces of relevant information as proof of concept. Or perhaps, it was merely a personal interest turned into classroom dogma. Occam's Razor turned itself into a disoriented compass. Her methodology wasn't particularly well-tested. For example, she emphatically preferred her students call her Jodie. It was possibly due to how small an age gap existed between students and a teacher who'd only finished college two years prior.
Possibly a consequence of her phonetically unfortunate last name.
Jodie, this particular class, had blatantly segued the discussion from the merits of the writer having chosen to anthropomorphize Death into a frank opinion harvesting of one of the most particularly pertinent forms of death: SOTF. She'd asked the question with grace much like freight trains liked to be graceful to walls and other sundry things they bore down upon at speed.
The question had gone unanswered for a few moments of prototypical living proof of the bystander effect.
The person who ultimately raised their hand got a quick nod. Torales hadn't spoken up much in the half of the class they'd so far lived and survived as peers together- Jodie was interested in him, in a way. Whenever he got called upon it was with several identifying quirks of personality: dead, dry voice; shifty eyes that only ever briefly landed on her before glancing off. Another particular quirk- never actually having his hand up. He got decent grades on essays in-class, besides how irritating it was to decipher his handwriting that did its best impression of bacteria under a microscope. Jodie wasn't too concerned about him because he did the work he needed to do. But she was occasionally curious- quiet kids unnerved her in a way, though she supposed that was a rather unfair bias, probably unique to these being her first years on the job.
"So, like you asked... mmm, cultural relevance of SOTF."
"Tons of obvious answers, of course? All the usual suspects brought up by everyone who has, y'know, an agenda to push."
"I always thought- uh- that it's like, y'know? Moral dimension to the whole thing."
"There's this weird back-and-forth-y thing in the law where citizen rights- to, uh. Self-autonomy, in a way?"
"Those, uh, are suspended for the purpose of. Like, fuuu...- putting 'em on the show, the kids who are gonna play that version."
"So it's like SOTF rewrote the sort of inale-iable rights citizens of the US are entitled to."
"A new social contract, in a way. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, get on this here show and die for entertainment value."
"Honestly, similar to the draft conceptually..."
"Well. Maybe."
Jodie nodded, head spinning a bit in the silence. Surprisingly fast talker, she hadn't seen that coming.
"Anyone want to respond to any of that? Or bring anything else up? I know a lot of you have an opinion on this topic in particular- and we don't need to hear mine, I'm hoping."
Timothy, belatedly had visions of being haunted by the ghosts of the manifest good will he had with his classmates, all killed by what he'd just put out there, onto the record of other people's brains that probably weren't particularly attuned to reality but might well have been.
It had been peaceful, basking in the glow of actually saying something for once. Of having overcome the usual inertia of his elbow resting on the kinda too-small desk that specifically ruined the lives of the left-handed in ways he as a right handed person could not imagine. Of having maybe assuaged his vague anxieties about a low participation grade that he usually tried his hardest to forget so he had an excuse to never talk. But then, of course, he'd opened his mouth. And his voice had, eventually, bounced off the walls and back into his ears. He hated his voice, honestly. It sounded okay through his own skull but his few experiences with microphones taught him it sounded way stupider outside-looking-in. Like Donald Duck smoking Bob Marley critique-listening to pretentious indie rock through the analogue tubes of an amplifier in some amateur college radio station.
He'd been trying to spin his pen, stuck between the same two fingers in the same position it had been in from the get-go, as in not actually moving around his finger. Tension broke the wrong way, the pen went flying into the aisle to his right, crisply clicking once as it skidded two desks too far forward. He suddenly had devote brain power to thinking of ways to crawl his foot forward and get the damn thing back.
Third priority in his hierarchy of thoughts, anyways. First was- holy shit I hope that didn't just actually happen. Second was- damn it was loud.
have you ever thought about taping your big mouth shut?
cause I have many times (Mangrove Garden English Class... open!)
have you ever thought about taping your big mouth shut?
Upcoming:
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
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Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
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Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
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MethodicalSlacker
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Jodie Fallis' Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class was the hardest that Jodi Hunter had ever taken, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she was a Junior in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition and everything to do with the fact that they had essentially the same name.
[Jodi: Start Pregame]
Calling her Ms. or Mrs. Fallis was out of the question, for the most part, but Jodi wasn't speaking in class anyway. That's not where the difficulty came from. What sucked was that, between students asking her questions and her tendency to speak in the second person at completely arbitrary and nonsensical times, Jodi couldn't stop herself from looking up from whatever she was doing and staring straight at whoever said her/her/their name. The first few weeks, it had been fine. Understandable. She even explained it once and someone laughed and then never thought about her again.
Every single time it happened after that brought her pain the likes of which belonged in the Survival of the Fittest that the class discussion had wandered towards, like it inevitably did every now and then. Jodi (Hunter) knew she was weird for not wanting to talk about it¹ most of the time, but she was already weird for other reasons, so that was okay.
Jodie (Fallis) asked the class if they had anything else to add. Jodi (Hunter) sure didn't. She looked down at her notebook² and the sketch she was working on. She'd been getting into architecture recently, and thus she'd been drawing a sort of Hellenic townscape on her page, columns and pillars and all. It was coming along somewhat nicely, and—
"Jodie?"
She looked up,
"Yes?"
and then immediately lowered her head.
She was busy enough learning things that were being taught to her on purpose. Learning how to know when people weren't talking to her was going to take a bunch of braindwidth³ that she didn't have. As the student rambled on about Survival of the Fittest and death and such and so forth, Jodi found her eyes wandering away from her paper and to the ground next to her foot. There was a pen sitting there, just kind of laying on the ground. It didn't look like any of hers, and she hadn't noticed it make its way over, so Jodi picked it up. She figured it fell out of her desk, that it had been left by the last person to have this seat, and she'd just stuff it back in so they could find it tomorrow.
With that squared away, Jodi went back to pretending to pay attention to class.
[1] - The most popular "text" of all time dangerously looming over every discussion she ever had stressed her out more often than it excited her. {a}
{a} - It never excited her.
[2] - Spiral bound, three subject, used for four classes.
[3] - sic.
[Jodi: Start Pregame]
Calling her Ms. or Mrs. Fallis was out of the question, for the most part, but Jodi wasn't speaking in class anyway. That's not where the difficulty came from. What sucked was that, between students asking her questions and her tendency to speak in the second person at completely arbitrary and nonsensical times, Jodi couldn't stop herself from looking up from whatever she was doing and staring straight at whoever said her/her/their name. The first few weeks, it had been fine. Understandable. She even explained it once and someone laughed and then never thought about her again.
Every single time it happened after that brought her pain the likes of which belonged in the Survival of the Fittest that the class discussion had wandered towards, like it inevitably did every now and then. Jodi (Hunter) knew she was weird for not wanting to talk about it¹ most of the time, but she was already weird for other reasons, so that was okay.
Jodie (Fallis) asked the class if they had anything else to add. Jodi (Hunter) sure didn't. She looked down at her notebook² and the sketch she was working on. She'd been getting into architecture recently, and thus she'd been drawing a sort of Hellenic townscape on her page, columns and pillars and all. It was coming along somewhat nicely, and—
"Jodie?"
She looked up,
"Yes?"
and then immediately lowered her head.
She was busy enough learning things that were being taught to her on purpose. Learning how to know when people weren't talking to her was going to take a bunch of braindwidth³ that she didn't have. As the student rambled on about Survival of the Fittest and death and such and so forth, Jodi found her eyes wandering away from her paper and to the ground next to her foot. There was a pen sitting there, just kind of laying on the ground. It didn't look like any of hers, and she hadn't noticed it make its way over, so Jodi picked it up. She figured it fell out of her desk, that it had been left by the last person to have this seat, and she'd just stuff it back in so they could find it tomorrow.
With that squared away, Jodi went back to pretending to pay attention to class.
[1] - The most popular "text" of all time dangerously looming over every discussion she ever had stressed her out more often than it excited her. {a}
{a} - It never excited her.
[2] - Spiral bound, three subject, used for four classes.
[3] - sic.
- 
- 
Fisk sat, waiting during the lull as Mrs. Fallus asked for any other comments or opinions on SOTF. Fisk had a few. Some he couldn’t say in the classroom, but there was enough to talk about in context with what Torales had said. Fisk raised his hand. She called on him next.
“I’d like to add on to what Timothy said, about SOTF being the modern equivalent to a draft.” Fisk clasped his driving glove-clad hands together. “See, he’s kinda right about that. “Sometime in the distant future, historians and archeologists, if there are any left, will look back on SOTF the same way we look at the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire.” Fingers pointed to a diamond, Fisk had a tendency to use his hands to speak. “You know; Render unto Caesar-” (he pronounced it Kai-zarr, the historically accurate way as you should, the man was a Legend, not a fucking salad). “...What is Caesar’s.”
Fisk leaned back in his seat, taking a breath. His hands separated, as he prepared what to say next. “Now-“ The clatter of a pen interrupted him. Fisk hoped that was an accident, because if not, that was major fucking rude. Fisk took a moment to adjust his tie, looking left and right for the source.
Fisk find the source as Jodi, the one that is fortunate to not have the phallic last name, leaning over to pick up a pen, as formerly mentioned Timothy was spazzing his leg out to help her with something she could clearly do herself in the odd and inefficient courtship method known as white-knighting. Australian accented wildlife narrator monologue aside, Fisk was glad to confirm that it was in fact an accident.
From the top. “Now, why we do it in place of a draft is kinda interesting, at least the dynamics are from my point of view. See, we’re in that time now, where America, like Rome, rules the world. We’re an empire, yet we have nobody left to fight, all of our enemies are either irrelevant third world skinnies with AKs, or capable of mutually assumed destruction, and each day the number of mouths to feed, from within and without, greatly outnumber our resources. Why SOTF is a thing is quite frankly obvious, but what I find fascinating is how it came into existence.”
He put his hands into a box in front of his face for emphasis. “What I really wanna know, is why they choose high schoolers for it. We got enough prisoners, death row inmates could fill out a season at the same pace even, volunteers certainly wouldn’t be out of the question, let’s be real, and there’s a lot of miscellaneous undesirables to choose from, yet the show runs on kids.” Fisk shrugged. “Course the media ain’t the only people to blame, the people love it. We eat up the circus and breadcrumbs routine, history has proven that, and as we know history repeats.” He put his hand upon his chin.
“What I really wanna know is, how did we green light it in the first place? You know, how did they pitch a bunch of high schoolers killing eachother so well that someone thought to themselves, ‘well now, there’s an idea, here’s ten million in cash, come back to my office next week.’” Fisk glanced out the window, rubbed his chin, laughed.
“What I really wouldn’t give to turn some by the book dystopian literature into reality like that. I wonder, does Mark Davison pay royalties to H.G. Orwell’s grave, six feet deep, for plagiarizing The Lottery? Messed up as it is, you gotta give credit where credit is due. Their sales pitch must’ve been top notch all things considered.”
“I’d like to add on to what Timothy said, about SOTF being the modern equivalent to a draft.” Fisk clasped his driving glove-clad hands together. “See, he’s kinda right about that. “Sometime in the distant future, historians and archeologists, if there are any left, will look back on SOTF the same way we look at the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire.” Fingers pointed to a diamond, Fisk had a tendency to use his hands to speak. “You know; Render unto Caesar-” (he pronounced it Kai-zarr, the historically accurate way as you should, the man was a Legend, not a fucking salad). “...What is Caesar’s.”
Fisk leaned back in his seat, taking a breath. His hands separated, as he prepared what to say next. “Now-“ The clatter of a pen interrupted him. Fisk hoped that was an accident, because if not, that was major fucking rude. Fisk took a moment to adjust his tie, looking left and right for the source.
Fisk find the source as Jodi, the one that is fortunate to not have the phallic last name, leaning over to pick up a pen, as formerly mentioned Timothy was spazzing his leg out to help her with something she could clearly do herself in the odd and inefficient courtship method known as white-knighting. Australian accented wildlife narrator monologue aside, Fisk was glad to confirm that it was in fact an accident.
From the top. “Now, why we do it in place of a draft is kinda interesting, at least the dynamics are from my point of view. See, we’re in that time now, where America, like Rome, rules the world. We’re an empire, yet we have nobody left to fight, all of our enemies are either irrelevant third world skinnies with AKs, or capable of mutually assumed destruction, and each day the number of mouths to feed, from within and without, greatly outnumber our resources. Why SOTF is a thing is quite frankly obvious, but what I find fascinating is how it came into existence.”
He put his hands into a box in front of his face for emphasis. “What I really wanna know, is why they choose high schoolers for it. We got enough prisoners, death row inmates could fill out a season at the same pace even, volunteers certainly wouldn’t be out of the question, let’s be real, and there’s a lot of miscellaneous undesirables to choose from, yet the show runs on kids.” Fisk shrugged. “Course the media ain’t the only people to blame, the people love it. We eat up the circus and breadcrumbs routine, history has proven that, and as we know history repeats.” He put his hand upon his chin.
“What I really wanna know is, how did we green light it in the first place? You know, how did they pitch a bunch of high schoolers killing eachother so well that someone thought to themselves, ‘well now, there’s an idea, here’s ten million in cash, come back to my office next week.’” Fisk glanced out the window, rubbed his chin, laughed.
“What I really wouldn’t give to turn some by the book dystopian literature into reality like that. I wonder, does Mark Davison pay royalties to H.G. Orwell’s grave, six feet deep, for plagiarizing The Lottery? Messed up as it is, you gotta give credit where credit is due. Their sales pitch must’ve been top notch all things considered.”
Catche thinks my squirrel is Fisk so here's my daily reminder that he is not.
Kaiser? Timothy entertained for far too dramatic a moment the sense that he'd missed a turning point in the air-quotes 'conversation' (implying he, Timothy, spoke to normal people?). What were they talking about now? Germany? Health insurance? He had explicitly Not been ready to play a part in the Democratic debates. Implying he cared about politics except for the part where some of them had way too New Englander accents.
What was the name of the, uh... super blonde, that was the best way to describe him? Timothy was actually pretty sure he'd tell the executioner to 'just shoot' when the day came that he was held at gunpoint with a classmate's name as his ticket to freedom. That aside. Super blonde had good points, actually. As in, he had good points, period. Saying 'actually' was another bad habit of his, along the lines of mouthbreathing or of cute anime girls (also boys, but girls were specifically the ones that earned stereotype points, exchangeable for trenchcoats and cargo shorts in select retailers). The word 'actually' was connotation for surprise in contexts where it modified the accomplishments of others. As in, 'Timothy was, all things considered, actually good at shooting himself in the foot'. Which was actually true.
Like say, right now. He actually wanted to shoot his foot off, envisioned the bloody stump and everything too. He'd almost bumped the hand of that nameless girl two desks forward who'd been busily swapping out his pen for thin air. Nameless- as in, he didn't even linger on the back of her head with his male gaze long enough to get a sense of her general profile. Consciously. He had the nagging suspicion that she was brunette and stupid tiny, like, Filipino-nutrition tier tiny.
RIP his pen. Amazingly it was the only writing implement he'd brought for the day, a genius move when he lost a pen a day on average. Oh sure, he could ask the girl two desks ahead to give it back, but that'd involve a multitude of scary landmines inclusive of: the dude sitting at the desk in between, the girl herself, and any other classmate who happened to look their way while he flailed his way around a simple question that was not so simple because interaction was inherently a losing values proposition- people's time was worth more than his spoken word. Put that shit in economics textbooks.
He finished hearing out Super Blonde, awkwardly reciting his talking points over and over in his head before the dude was even done speaking. In that mental arena Timothy was the louder one, as syllables were carefully processed before being scrambled up in his throat anyways.
"What-"
didn't know the name didn't know the name
"he said is a really good way of looking at it. Comparing it to, say, The Lottery or something like 1984 or a Clockwork Orange, it's like..." Ooh, he should not have tried to extrapolate all those comparisons but whoops, there was his mouth cashing checks he didn't have the credit for. "An American mythology, almost. Like was already said," barely two seconds ago, "America is Rome re-deux. SOTF is our gladiatorial games, but maybe, like... re-imagined for the modern world?"
"Like, say. My answer to that question of, 'why the specific contestants we pick as a nation'?" Timothy stared at the ceiling lights intensely, like they were the moderator, the audience, the panelists judging his performance. "I think the general idea of TV isn't to punish or even necessarily to entertain, but it's to define a uniquely American culture. Do something the rest of the world doesn't do... Also, to be honest, entertainment value. It'd be hard for us to root for society's undesirables." Was that a PC word? For that matter, was this a PC discussion? Timothy felt uncomfortable... but lol, he always felt that. "But making it the average American makes the storylines that much more compelling. We, the viewer, could be the villain as much as anyone like, Evans or Manassa or Kovalenka."
It'd been so long since he'd actually watched an episode in full. He hoped the Twitter pundits he followed (mostly because they also did Champions content) were ones with reasonably popular takes.
Also, he'd probably mispronounced Kovalenka out-loud, damn white people names.
"So we are all bound together as a society by our ability to see ourselves in TV, but to enjoy it and criticize it from an outsider perspective. Like a safety valve."
His conclusions hung in the air like wet laundry. Heavy, soapy. He regretted having spoken so much already. Some small part of him visible in the evasive fear sneaky under his overly long bangs hoped someone else would take over the conversation. Let him vanish before it was even later than too late.
What was the name of the, uh... super blonde, that was the best way to describe him? Timothy was actually pretty sure he'd tell the executioner to 'just shoot' when the day came that he was held at gunpoint with a classmate's name as his ticket to freedom. That aside. Super blonde had good points, actually. As in, he had good points, period. Saying 'actually' was another bad habit of his, along the lines of mouthbreathing or of cute anime girls (also boys, but girls were specifically the ones that earned stereotype points, exchangeable for trenchcoats and cargo shorts in select retailers). The word 'actually' was connotation for surprise in contexts where it modified the accomplishments of others. As in, 'Timothy was, all things considered, actually good at shooting himself in the foot'. Which was actually true.
Like say, right now. He actually wanted to shoot his foot off, envisioned the bloody stump and everything too. He'd almost bumped the hand of that nameless girl two desks forward who'd been busily swapping out his pen for thin air. Nameless- as in, he didn't even linger on the back of her head with his male gaze long enough to get a sense of her general profile. Consciously. He had the nagging suspicion that she was brunette and stupid tiny, like, Filipino-nutrition tier tiny.
RIP his pen. Amazingly it was the only writing implement he'd brought for the day, a genius move when he lost a pen a day on average. Oh sure, he could ask the girl two desks ahead to give it back, but that'd involve a multitude of scary landmines inclusive of: the dude sitting at the desk in between, the girl herself, and any other classmate who happened to look their way while he flailed his way around a simple question that was not so simple because interaction was inherently a losing values proposition- people's time was worth more than his spoken word. Put that shit in economics textbooks.
He finished hearing out Super Blonde, awkwardly reciting his talking points over and over in his head before the dude was even done speaking. In that mental arena Timothy was the louder one, as syllables were carefully processed before being scrambled up in his throat anyways.
"What-"
didn't know the name didn't know the name
"he said is a really good way of looking at it. Comparing it to, say, The Lottery or something like 1984 or a Clockwork Orange, it's like..." Ooh, he should not have tried to extrapolate all those comparisons but whoops, there was his mouth cashing checks he didn't have the credit for. "An American mythology, almost. Like was already said," barely two seconds ago, "America is Rome re-deux. SOTF is our gladiatorial games, but maybe, like... re-imagined for the modern world?"
"Like, say. My answer to that question of, 'why the specific contestants we pick as a nation'?" Timothy stared at the ceiling lights intensely, like they were the moderator, the audience, the panelists judging his performance. "I think the general idea of TV isn't to punish or even necessarily to entertain, but it's to define a uniquely American culture. Do something the rest of the world doesn't do... Also, to be honest, entertainment value. It'd be hard for us to root for society's undesirables." Was that a PC word? For that matter, was this a PC discussion? Timothy felt uncomfortable... but lol, he always felt that. "But making it the average American makes the storylines that much more compelling. We, the viewer, could be the villain as much as anyone like, Evans or Manassa or Kovalenka."
It'd been so long since he'd actually watched an episode in full. He hoped the Twitter pundits he followed (mostly because they also did Champions content) were ones with reasonably popular takes.
Also, he'd probably mispronounced Kovalenka out-loud, damn white people names.
"So we are all bound together as a society by our ability to see ourselves in TV, but to enjoy it and criticize it from an outsider perspective. Like a safety valve."
His conclusions hung in the air like wet laundry. Heavy, soapy. He regretted having spoken so much already. Some small part of him visible in the evasive fear sneaky under his overly long bangs hoped someone else would take over the conversation. Let him vanish before it was even later than too late.
Upcoming:
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
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MethodicalSlacker
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For her part, Jodi played with her new pen as Fisk and Timothy spoke at each other⁴. It wrote pretty well, compared to the writing instruments she had brought herself. It drew even better. Whoever had left this behind had seriously lost something special. Doodling gave Jodi something to do with her hands while other people talked. She was still listening to what they were saying, even if that listening wasn't especially close. Fisk gave his opinion, which, uh, certainly was a collection of words that someone was allowed to say. Jodi wasn't all that sure how well Timothy's initial assertion that Survival of the Fittest was comparable to the draft held up under scrutiny. To her, the faux patriotism of the show was just a thin disguise, under which the same driving force that governed most everything these days lay. It wasn't even really trying to pretend, actually. Capitalism⁵ is not particularly subtle, and it has no reason to be.
Timothy's response further muddied the waters. American mythology seemed an apt description⁶, but only in the sense that Jodi was fairly certain that was the intended aim of the marketing executives and people behind the show. The point about Gladiators worked in the sense that Gladiatorial games were also heavily marketed and advertised, with billboards and pamphlets describing the combatants, the reasons for their fighting, and the various amenities of the stadium that they were fighting in⁷. She didn't really get his specific references to contestants⁸, but that didn't matter. He said it himself. It's all about the struggles of the average American—but the fact that any given contestant is an audience-insert just goes to show the power of Survival of the Fittest as a marketing effort to reach the lowest common denominator. A successful one, at that.
The more she thought about them, the more strongly Jodi felt about her opinions. Maybe now was the time to speak up and share with the class what she thought. It's not like she'd be starting this particular line of questioning. Jodi would merely be adding on to the existing conversation. That was a relatively safe move to make. She could get away with that. Jodi raised her hand to be called on. Jodie (Fallis) looked somewhat surprised to see her wanting to be called on,⁹ and thus pointed at her and said
"Jodi?"
and suddenly she didn't feel so sure. What if everyone else was already tired of this conversation? What if she'd look like a know-it-all, one of a handful of juniors in a senior Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class, just waiting to add her own bit on to the end of an already overlong conversation? Briefly, Jodi considered asking if she could go to the restroom instead of saying her piece, but by the time she'd considered that too long of a pause had transpired for her to ask that and not look like she just shit her pants¹⁰ and so she was forced to clear her throat and turn roughly towards Fisk and Timothy and, by extension, the entire class, and begin her discourse.
"Uh, so, I think there are some very good points being raised, here, but we're sort of losing sight of a bigger sort of reality here. The goal, um, of every television program and honestly every commercialized piece of media is to sell. Things. Survival of the Fittest is very, has very, it has a lot of merchandise? Yeah? And part of the appeal—I think really the reason why they pick these random schools is because, yes, the average American can relate, and because the average American has a good chance of relating to the cast, and even not so average Americans have a good chance of finding a contestant they like, then they can effectively market to everyone as a sort of lowest common denominationary¹¹ thing.
"Contestants in Survival of the Fittest are essentially corporate mascots. They're like uh mythological figures in the same way that the Geico gecko and Ronald McDonald can be. Except, of course, they're supposedly more 'natural'. Embedded content, native advertising, that sort of thing. Ultimately like just a way to shift 'The Immense Collection of Commodities' that carries the Ess-Oh-Tee-Eff logo. I guess that's mythology, but, uh, sort of perversely?"
And just as abruptly as she started, Jodi stopped, and shrunk a little in her seat.
[4] - Jodi didn't personally know them that well{a}. She wasn't even sure that they'd formally introduced themselves to her, at any point. There was a possibility that they had and she had forgotten, but Jodi considered it distant. Jodi didn't know many people, but she made an effort to attempt to learn their names. Just in case.
{a} - It didn't help that they were seniors.
[5] - Das Kapital was sitting on Jodi's bedside table when she left the house this morning. It had been sitting there for the last few weeks, lightly skimmed, occasionally sticky-noted, and never fully understood. {a}
{a} - Well, that wasn't entirely accurate. Jodi felt like she understood Das Kapital by the end of the third video she watched about it and the second read-through of the Spark-notes summary, but the actual text was maybe a little too dense for her. She'd come back to it in a couple years, she was certain.
[6] - If an entirely too celebratory one.
[7] - Futrell 2006, pp. 85, 101, 110. Based on fragmentary Pompeian remains and citing of Pliny's Historia Naturalis, 19.23–25.
[8] - To come to her own defense, Jodi would point out that she has not seen the show in several seasons. Jodi would also know just how faulty this defense was, and thus choose not to make it.
[9] - Or perhaps surprised that Jodi went through the trouble of raising her hand instead of just interrupting the conversation.
[10] - There are very few circumstances under which Jodi would legitimately consider suicide. If this happened and she hadn't already died of embarrassment on the spot, it'd be one of them.
[11] - sic.
Timothy's response further muddied the waters. American mythology seemed an apt description⁶, but only in the sense that Jodi was fairly certain that was the intended aim of the marketing executives and people behind the show. The point about Gladiators worked in the sense that Gladiatorial games were also heavily marketed and advertised, with billboards and pamphlets describing the combatants, the reasons for their fighting, and the various amenities of the stadium that they were fighting in⁷. She didn't really get his specific references to contestants⁸, but that didn't matter. He said it himself. It's all about the struggles of the average American—but the fact that any given contestant is an audience-insert just goes to show the power of Survival of the Fittest as a marketing effort to reach the lowest common denominator. A successful one, at that.
The more she thought about them, the more strongly Jodi felt about her opinions. Maybe now was the time to speak up and share with the class what she thought. It's not like she'd be starting this particular line of questioning. Jodi would merely be adding on to the existing conversation. That was a relatively safe move to make. She could get away with that. Jodi raised her hand to be called on. Jodie (Fallis) looked somewhat surprised to see her wanting to be called on,⁹ and thus pointed at her and said
"Jodi?"
and suddenly she didn't feel so sure. What if everyone else was already tired of this conversation? What if she'd look like a know-it-all, one of a handful of juniors in a senior Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition class, just waiting to add her own bit on to the end of an already overlong conversation? Briefly, Jodi considered asking if she could go to the restroom instead of saying her piece, but by the time she'd considered that too long of a pause had transpired for her to ask that and not look like she just shit her pants¹⁰ and so she was forced to clear her throat and turn roughly towards Fisk and Timothy and, by extension, the entire class, and begin her discourse.
"Uh, so, I think there are some very good points being raised, here, but we're sort of losing sight of a bigger sort of reality here. The goal, um, of every television program and honestly every commercialized piece of media is to sell. Things. Survival of the Fittest is very, has very, it has a lot of merchandise? Yeah? And part of the appeal—I think really the reason why they pick these random schools is because, yes, the average American can relate, and because the average American has a good chance of relating to the cast, and even not so average Americans have a good chance of finding a contestant they like, then they can effectively market to everyone as a sort of lowest common denominationary¹¹ thing.
"Contestants in Survival of the Fittest are essentially corporate mascots. They're like uh mythological figures in the same way that the Geico gecko and Ronald McDonald can be. Except, of course, they're supposedly more 'natural'. Embedded content, native advertising, that sort of thing. Ultimately like just a way to shift 'The Immense Collection of Commodities' that carries the Ess-Oh-Tee-Eff logo. I guess that's mythology, but, uh, sort of perversely?"
And just as abruptly as she started, Jodi stopped, and shrunk a little in her seat.
[4] - Jodi didn't personally know them that well{a}. She wasn't even sure that they'd formally introduced themselves to her, at any point. There was a possibility that they had and she had forgotten, but Jodi considered it distant. Jodi didn't know many people, but she made an effort to attempt to learn their names. Just in case.
{a} - It didn't help that they were seniors.
[5] - Das Kapital was sitting on Jodi's bedside table when she left the house this morning. It had been sitting there for the last few weeks, lightly skimmed, occasionally sticky-noted, and never fully understood. {a}
{a} - Well, that wasn't entirely accurate. Jodi felt like she understood Das Kapital by the end of the third video she watched about it and the second read-through of the Spark-notes summary, but the actual text was maybe a little too dense for her. She'd come back to it in a couple years, she was certain.
[6] - If an entirely too celebratory one.
[7] - Futrell 2006, pp. 85, 101, 110. Based on fragmentary Pompeian remains and citing of Pliny's Historia Naturalis, 19.23–25.
[8] - To come to her own defense, Jodi would point out that she has not seen the show in several seasons. Jodi would also know just how faulty this defense was, and thus choose not to make it.
[9] - Or perhaps surprised that Jodi went through the trouble of raising her hand instead of just interrupting the conversation.
[10] - There are very few circumstances under which Jodi would legitimately consider suicide. If this happened and she hadn't already died of embarrassment on the spot, it'd be one of them.
[11] - sic.
Fisk listened as Timothy and then Jodi chimed in one what he had to say. He began to mentally prepare to snap back, to turn this into a full blown discussion but as he listened in, he couldn’t really see the point. So far with the way they worded it, it sounded like they agreed with him, which was a welcome surprise! It really shouldn’t have been considering he was pretty much right, but there’s always that one, the wannabe counter culture virtue signaler who cares about the ethics of SOTF and how ‘inherently wrong’ it is, in front of people of course, never behind closed doors where they too watch it in private like that shameless hack Crawford who forgot about her sister the moment SOTF offered that almighty dollar. Disappointing that the discussion didn’t go that way, but Fisk guessed that was just because he did too good a job showing his powerlevel today.
After all what was life without a little adversity? Competition and imposing of one’s wills makes the world go round, separates the weak minded from the strong, trains the brain to succeed in society, etc.
Fisk leaned back, relaxed. They both had good points, Timothy comparing it to American mythology and Jodi to corporate mascots. Ooooooh! Fisk can work with this, now there was the possibility that adversity could be found from it. He began to raise his hand, but caught himself, turning it into a stretch as he popped his back with his chair. He had some things he’d love to jump in with, but he wanted to wait a moment to see if Timothy would double down on his own points, or shift over to Jodi’s side.
There still was some potential to have a little fun with this. Fisk smiled, hands clasped on the desk, fingers tapping knuckles.
After all what was life without a little adversity? Competition and imposing of one’s wills makes the world go round, separates the weak minded from the strong, trains the brain to succeed in society, etc.
Fisk leaned back, relaxed. They both had good points, Timothy comparing it to American mythology and Jodi to corporate mascots. Ooooooh! Fisk can work with this, now there was the possibility that adversity could be found from it. He began to raise his hand, but caught himself, turning it into a stretch as he popped his back with his chair. He had some things he’d love to jump in with, but he wanted to wait a moment to see if Timothy would double down on his own points, or shift over to Jodi’s side.
There still was some potential to have a little fun with this. Fisk smiled, hands clasped on the desk, fingers tapping knuckles.
Catche thinks my squirrel is Fisk so here's my daily reminder that he is not.
He'd never noticed that the lights in this classroom had an arrhythmia to them. Heartbeat-beat, instead of a steadier heartbeat-heartbeat. Triplet flow... like, uh. Migos, essentially. He was observing the music of the universe in ceiling lighting. Probably deserved a five to a light six.
Classroom debate, by the way. That was what he was supposed to be doing, somewhere in the white noise void outside of his head where people were beautiful and completely unapproachable. Yes, even Verity to an extent. He hadn't heard anyone speak up yet. If someone (him) made a statement and no-one (human beings) acknowledged it, had the statement ever existed?
He looked down, and saw the pen thief raising her hand. Huh. People still raised their hands in high school? Or no- worse, that was what they were supposed to be doing all along and Timothy had been getting it wrong and announcing it to the world loudly and proudly (a deadly sin). Made a ton of sense, didn't it? A typical scenario on this, the only planet Earth inhabited by some billion fleshbags and a walking pile of horny garbage in the singular.
'Losing sight of a bigger sort of reality'. Man, as if Timothy even wanted to exist in a microcosm of reality, let alone the bigger more general one? 'Denominationary' was a nice sounding word, though. Was it actually a word? Timothy wasn't too sure of that, but he figured it was best to take her (whoever she was) word for it.
He... didn't know? S-oh-TF was a bastardized board-of-execs brainworm infecting the youth? Sure. It was probably a better idea than anime (which was a mistake). That all made sense. The Geico gecko was blessed with the modern divine right, claiming dominion over the ad-watching masses with clout immaterial by fifteen percent or more? Yeah, he got it. He also was in no way sure where else this conversation was supposed to go. As a collective, the three of them (him, plus two people who actually knew what they were talking about) had hogged about ten minutes of classroom airtime. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe the others who weren't speaking up appreciated the time to the bell constantly being halved, Zeno's arrow slowly honing in on it's mark.
Cursorily he raised his hand with a slightly stupefied nod.
"I mean, she got it right. That's more or less how I'd put it too."
He didn't want to put in the effort anymore. But he still felt annoyed, like he'd settled for the cheap and easy, because there was probably a nuanced middle ground where he agreed with her but also actually looked like he had something to say as opposed to
promptly realizing he was agreeing with someone in class with such a submissive dint to his refusing to add on or elaborate and had drawn such attention to it like shoving the implied exclamation point down his own throat in a phenomenal display of fellatio, obviously the most likely way his acceding could be interpreted by a classroom full of people who were too normal to assign value to giving up on everything like he was inclined was that he was making a tactical concession, that was, he was trying to curry favor with the other people arguing AKA, actually, ultimately, unfortunately he was just in some roundabout way by way of the social norms he had never quite figured out he was actually just sucking up to the girl and that was never a good look because that was gross and male gaze-y and he didn't mean it, or at least had only meant it in a platonic 'i respect your opinions as a classmate (who doesnt know your name and was really only half listening to your spiel)' sense but
Classroom debate, by the way. That was what he was supposed to be doing, somewhere in the white noise void outside of his head where people were beautiful and completely unapproachable. Yes, even Verity to an extent. He hadn't heard anyone speak up yet. If someone (him) made a statement and no-one (human beings) acknowledged it, had the statement ever existed?
He looked down, and saw the pen thief raising her hand. Huh. People still raised their hands in high school? Or no- worse, that was what they were supposed to be doing all along and Timothy had been getting it wrong and announcing it to the world loudly and proudly (a deadly sin). Made a ton of sense, didn't it? A typical scenario on this, the only planet Earth inhabited by some billion fleshbags and a walking pile of horny garbage in the singular.
'Losing sight of a bigger sort of reality'. Man, as if Timothy even wanted to exist in a microcosm of reality, let alone the bigger more general one? 'Denominationary' was a nice sounding word, though. Was it actually a word? Timothy wasn't too sure of that, but he figured it was best to take her (whoever she was) word for it.
He... didn't know? S-oh-TF was a bastardized board-of-execs brainworm infecting the youth? Sure. It was probably a better idea than anime (which was a mistake). That all made sense. The Geico gecko was blessed with the modern divine right, claiming dominion over the ad-watching masses with clout immaterial by fifteen percent or more? Yeah, he got it. He also was in no way sure where else this conversation was supposed to go. As a collective, the three of them (him, plus two people who actually knew what they were talking about) had hogged about ten minutes of classroom airtime. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe the others who weren't speaking up appreciated the time to the bell constantly being halved, Zeno's arrow slowly honing in on it's mark.
Cursorily he raised his hand with a slightly stupefied nod.
"I mean, she got it right. That's more or less how I'd put it too."
He didn't want to put in the effort anymore. But he still felt annoyed, like he'd settled for the cheap and easy, because there was probably a nuanced middle ground where he agreed with her but also actually looked like he had something to say as opposed to
promptly realizing he was agreeing with someone in class with such a submissive dint to his refusing to add on or elaborate and had drawn such attention to it like shoving the implied exclamation point down his own throat in a phenomenal display of fellatio, obviously the most likely way his acceding could be interpreted by a classroom full of people who were too normal to assign value to giving up on everything like he was inclined was that he was making a tactical concession, that was, he was trying to curry favor with the other people arguing AKA, actually, ultimately, unfortunately he was just in some roundabout way by way of the social norms he had never quite figured out he was actually just sucking up to the girl and that was never a good look because that was gross and male gaze-y and he didn't mean it, or at least had only meant it in a platonic 'i respect your opinions as a classmate (who doesnt know your name and was really only half listening to your spiel)' sense but
Upcoming:
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
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MethodicalSlacker
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There was no response¹² from her classmates.
Fisk leaned back in his chair and looked around the room, preoccupied with something. His fingers made an anxious noise as they skittered across the surface of his desk, tapping in a rhythm that Jodi couldn't quite wrap her ears around. Timothy did effectively the same thing, although he added some words to his abdication of personal responsibility for a reaction to what Jodi had said. It didn't look like anyone else in the class had anything to say, either, which only made things worse. Jodi had no idea what everyone else thought of her. They just wouldn't say it. Their faces didn't show it, either. They looked generally as bored with class as they had been before this whole discussion.
With every passing moment of silence Jodi felt herself sinking further and further back into her chair, even if she wasn't actually moving. Maybe she should have said something that hinted that she had more to say, even if she didn't, really. Maybe then someone would ask her more about it, and she could pose a question to the rest of the class for once, flipping the script on Jodie¹³ and taking a stance as a classroom leader, a real participant, a suck-up and a teacher's pet and yeah she was glad she didn't wind up doing that. Never-mind that she'd chicken out halfway through and just let someone else clarify whatever it was she had intended to say. They'd mangle her message, because there wasn't one, and make her look bad, and she'd have to sit there and just take it.
Which was sort of what she was doing right now.
Jodi took the floor pen in her hand and started twirling it around her thumb. It took a whole month's worth of afternoons to pick up pen spinning, but it had paid off immeasurably well. Now, instead of simply staring into the paper on her desk, onlookers would see her spinning her writing utensil and think Aha! Now there's a girl that is thinking thoughts! Look how deep in thought she is, with her pen spinning in nearly immaculate circles! It'd already paid off just the other day, when she caught someone staring at her hand¹⁴. This was the kind of quiet attention she craved, the absolute and total command of momentum and gravity befitting of someone as high on the class rankings as her. Yes, the pen spinning was an emblem of her success, her accomplishment, her tireless hard work and dedicashit it fell out of her hand and onto the floor.
Womp womp.
There it lay, in the space between desks. Jodi reached down to pick it up with her hand, trying to be quiet and not distracting as she did so, which was basically impossible given the clattering noise it made as it hit the ground.
[12] - It was a cruel coincidence that Jodi had been reading an article about Impostor Syndrome on her phone before class began, she would later realize.
[13] - Fallis.
[14] - Though to be fair that kid had a habit of zoning out during AP Bio class and was probably looking for some excuse to not pay attention. Jodi was still happy to provide that regardless. Better her pen than a phone screen, or something.
Fisk leaned back in his chair and looked around the room, preoccupied with something. His fingers made an anxious noise as they skittered across the surface of his desk, tapping in a rhythm that Jodi couldn't quite wrap her ears around. Timothy did effectively the same thing, although he added some words to his abdication of personal responsibility for a reaction to what Jodi had said. It didn't look like anyone else in the class had anything to say, either, which only made things worse. Jodi had no idea what everyone else thought of her. They just wouldn't say it. Their faces didn't show it, either. They looked generally as bored with class as they had been before this whole discussion.
With every passing moment of silence Jodi felt herself sinking further and further back into her chair, even if she wasn't actually moving. Maybe she should have said something that hinted that she had more to say, even if she didn't, really. Maybe then someone would ask her more about it, and she could pose a question to the rest of the class for once, flipping the script on Jodie¹³ and taking a stance as a classroom leader, a real participant, a suck-up and a teacher's pet and yeah she was glad she didn't wind up doing that. Never-mind that she'd chicken out halfway through and just let someone else clarify whatever it was she had intended to say. They'd mangle her message, because there wasn't one, and make her look bad, and she'd have to sit there and just take it.
Which was sort of what she was doing right now.
Jodi took the floor pen in her hand and started twirling it around her thumb. It took a whole month's worth of afternoons to pick up pen spinning, but it had paid off immeasurably well. Now, instead of simply staring into the paper on her desk, onlookers would see her spinning her writing utensil and think Aha! Now there's a girl that is thinking thoughts! Look how deep in thought she is, with her pen spinning in nearly immaculate circles! It'd already paid off just the other day, when she caught someone staring at her hand¹⁴. This was the kind of quiet attention she craved, the absolute and total command of momentum and gravity befitting of someone as high on the class rankings as her. Yes, the pen spinning was an emblem of her success, her accomplishment, her tireless hard work and dedicashit it fell out of her hand and onto the floor.
Womp womp.
There it lay, in the space between desks. Jodi reached down to pick it up with her hand, trying to be quiet and not distracting as she did so, which was basically impossible given the clattering noise it made as it hit the ground.
[12] - It was a cruel coincidence that Jodi had been reading an article about Impostor Syndrome on her phone before class began, she would later realize.
[13] - Fallis.
[14] - Though to be fair that kid had a habit of zoning out during AP Bio class and was probably looking for some excuse to not pay attention. Jodi was still happy to provide that regardless. Better her pen than a phone screen, or something.
Quiet.
Silence.
A synonym for the lack of noise that Fisk couldn’t think of.
Crickets crickets...
Yes that’ll do.
Fisk had thought of something to counter the whole corporate mascot thing with SOTF, that compared it even more to the old Roman Empire thing, calling it the modern religion, with its pantheon of winners as the gods, and other famous characters as patron saints of certain behaviors, but after so long of a silence it became too awkward to really continue.
It was a shame, the debate had the potential to become a real ring dinger, but Cee Lo Vee as the French say. Now everything was quiet and even Mrs. Phallic hadn’t chimed in yet so everyone was sitting around, wasting time. Fine by Fisk to be honest. He was not new to the whole waste his time when he could be doing something more important, so this didn’t phase him as much.
He’d drink in the silence, go into a daze and let time speed on by as he daydreamed o-
The clatter of a pen shook the room with the force of ten ICBMs, Fisk’s head shooting to the source like a dog and a squirrel. Again with the freakin’ pen, holy fuck butterfingers what the fuck is up with you and-
It was Jodi too! Same friggen Gal! Color Fisk a bright shade of surprise it’s fucking nil! Once is an accident, twice is a disruption. Fisk hated, hated, hated when silence gets disrupted with the most sudden of noises like that! Shit just gets amplified ten fold and it doesn’t make a difference if it’s a pen dropping or someone suck starting a shotgun, it’s fucking loud and it breaks his concentration and makes him just want to yeet a fucking textbook and AAAAAAAAA-
Fisk’s eyelid twitched. He sighed. Nothing gets under his skin more than someone breaking his daze like that. It’s the little things that are always the most annoying. You can’t do anything about it because that’d be some clear over reacting, but god damn that shit was Chinese water torture tier.
Shoulda kept the conversation going at this rate, damn.
Silence.
A synonym for the lack of noise that Fisk couldn’t think of.
Crickets crickets...
Yes that’ll do.
Fisk had thought of something to counter the whole corporate mascot thing with SOTF, that compared it even more to the old Roman Empire thing, calling it the modern religion, with its pantheon of winners as the gods, and other famous characters as patron saints of certain behaviors, but after so long of a silence it became too awkward to really continue.
It was a shame, the debate had the potential to become a real ring dinger, but Cee Lo Vee as the French say. Now everything was quiet and even Mrs. Phallic hadn’t chimed in yet so everyone was sitting around, wasting time. Fine by Fisk to be honest. He was not new to the whole waste his time when he could be doing something more important, so this didn’t phase him as much.
He’d drink in the silence, go into a daze and let time speed on by as he daydreamed o-
The clatter of a pen shook the room with the force of ten ICBMs, Fisk’s head shooting to the source like a dog and a squirrel. Again with the freakin’ pen, holy fuck butterfingers what the fuck is up with you and-
It was Jodi too! Same friggen Gal! Color Fisk a bright shade of surprise it’s fucking nil! Once is an accident, twice is a disruption. Fisk hated, hated, hated when silence gets disrupted with the most sudden of noises like that! Shit just gets amplified ten fold and it doesn’t make a difference if it’s a pen dropping or someone suck starting a shotgun, it’s fucking loud and it breaks his concentration and makes him just want to yeet a fucking textbook and AAAAAAAAA-
Fisk’s eyelid twitched. He sighed. Nothing gets under his skin more than someone breaking his daze like that. It’s the little things that are always the most annoying. You can’t do anything about it because that’d be some clear over reacting, but god damn that shit was Chinese water torture tier.
Shoulda kept the conversation going at this rate, damn.
Catche thinks my squirrel is Fisk so here's my daily reminder that he is not.
Actually he'd given up on the panicking pretty quickly. Not that he still didn't feel like he'd somehow made a faux pas he didn't understand the implications of! But the urgency had faded like the ebbing of mercury in a thermometer. He... gave a fuck, but didn't have the energy for it anymore. Or something like that, hard to tell. Better to not think about it too hard anyways. He was already tired of and embarrassed in himself, he could afford to go lazy brain. Anime dreams, like that weird Homestuck webcomic that was an artifact of an old people internet.
"... Alright, so. Does anyone else in the class have anything else to add? Timothy, Jodi, and Fisk hit on a lot of interesting points concerning Survival of the Fittest and it's outsize impact on the culture of America."
Bronze-tier mechanics, as Timothy overtly and obviously dodged Mrs. Fallis' eye when she even kind of glanced in his direction.
At least he knew the names of the other two that had been speaking, like, until he forgot. A plastic shaped snip cut him out of un-reality for a moment. He was compelled, by the uselessness of instinct, to look at something that didn't really concern him, and heaven help him if there was a human presence involved.
"Nobody?"
Probably, all he had to do was catch the girl's attention (name??) and he'd have his only pen back.
"... Maybe I'll ask this. Is a corporate bastard-form of culture still relevant as culture, or is it something else altogether, no longer inherently defining of society?"
He'd definitely never be getting his pen back. His energy had alternative uses: none. Maybe sitting around pretending to have witty responses to a classroom dialogue burned some calories.
((Timothy Torales continued elsewhere))
"... Alright, so. Does anyone else in the class have anything else to add? Timothy, Jodi, and Fisk hit on a lot of interesting points concerning Survival of the Fittest and it's outsize impact on the culture of America."
Bronze-tier mechanics, as Timothy overtly and obviously dodged Mrs. Fallis' eye when she even kind of glanced in his direction.
At least he knew the names of the other two that had been speaking, like, until he forgot. A plastic shaped snip cut him out of un-reality for a moment. He was compelled, by the uselessness of instinct, to look at something that didn't really concern him, and heaven help him if there was a human presence involved.
"Nobody?"
Probably, all he had to do was catch the girl's attention (name??) and he'd have his only pen back.
"... Maybe I'll ask this. Is a corporate bastard-form of culture still relevant as culture, or is it something else altogether, no longer inherently defining of society?"
He'd definitely never be getting his pen back. His energy had alternative uses: none. Maybe sitting around pretending to have witty responses to a classroom dialogue burned some calories.
((Timothy Torales continued elsewhere))
Upcoming:
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
Second Chances V3 (deconreconfirmed):
Relations Thread!
Olivia Fischer (original handler, Maraoone)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Faith Marshal-Mackenzie (original handler, Frozen Smoke)
Memories: 1 Pregame: 1
Sayuna Lewis (original handler, Cicada)
Princess McQuillan (original handler, Cicada)
Pregame: 1
Fisk went back into a daze, as Mrs. Fallus went back into whatever she was originally talking about, by patronizing SOTF and it’s fans.
Fisk wanted to speak up, but this conversation had basically run it’s course. A ‘corporate-bastard culture’ was still a culture. For as long as Fisk was alive it’s been a thing. For as long as the country was alive it’s been a thing. Santa Claus loves Coke-a-cola, and there was a McDonald’s on every country in the planet, even North Korea to the best of Fisk’s knowledge. Again, it’s a consequence of ruling the world, but it isn’t America that runs it, we’re just the home of it. To try to politicize it is pointless. This corporate-bastard culture spreads its tentacles to all four corners of the globe. The world isn’t owned by the red white and blue, it’s policed by it. The real kings are the followers of the flag with three circles, the great Magic Mouse. The fact that SOTF was part of all of that is irrelevant. All hail the great god Mickey.
Cyberpunk 2077 theme intensifies, or something of those lines. Either way, it didn’t matter much to Fisk. It’s been happening long before him, it’ll happen long after him, when his hair is naturally white, and not just dyed. He didn’t mind it much, because it was all he knew.
There wasn’t a different system in his mind, because all other systems have failed exponentially. ‘B-b-b-but not my type!’ No, it failed too, just the country that used it was too small and irrelevant for the news to even bring it up. If you don’t have nukes, oil, or a significant voice on the world stage, your country is irrelevant. Sorry, sucks to suck.
Besides, someone else’s idea of a perfect society is another’s hell. As we stray farther and farther away from crawling in the dirt for worms to eat, we just climb closer to the sun to burn away. In the end, we’re all crash course for a dystopia. Fisk didn’t mind his in the end. Sure it was unethical, but let’s be real.
SOTF-TV is a lot more fun than, say, Soma. That’s just the facts. Sorry Huxley, super drugs are so 1920’s. The 2020’s are here, and they want bloodsports.
((Fisk Bateman continued elsewhere.))
Fisk wanted to speak up, but this conversation had basically run it’s course. A ‘corporate-bastard culture’ was still a culture. For as long as Fisk was alive it’s been a thing. For as long as the country was alive it’s been a thing. Santa Claus loves Coke-a-cola, and there was a McDonald’s on every country in the planet, even North Korea to the best of Fisk’s knowledge. Again, it’s a consequence of ruling the world, but it isn’t America that runs it, we’re just the home of it. To try to politicize it is pointless. This corporate-bastard culture spreads its tentacles to all four corners of the globe. The world isn’t owned by the red white and blue, it’s policed by it. The real kings are the followers of the flag with three circles, the great Magic Mouse. The fact that SOTF was part of all of that is irrelevant. All hail the great god Mickey.
Cyberpunk 2077 theme intensifies, or something of those lines. Either way, it didn’t matter much to Fisk. It’s been happening long before him, it’ll happen long after him, when his hair is naturally white, and not just dyed. He didn’t mind it much, because it was all he knew.
There wasn’t a different system in his mind, because all other systems have failed exponentially. ‘B-b-b-but not my type!’ No, it failed too, just the country that used it was too small and irrelevant for the news to even bring it up. If you don’t have nukes, oil, or a significant voice on the world stage, your country is irrelevant. Sorry, sucks to suck.
Besides, someone else’s idea of a perfect society is another’s hell. As we stray farther and farther away from crawling in the dirt for worms to eat, we just climb closer to the sun to burn away. In the end, we’re all crash course for a dystopia. Fisk didn’t mind his in the end. Sure it was unethical, but let’s be real.
SOTF-TV is a lot more fun than, say, Soma. That’s just the facts. Sorry Huxley, super drugs are so 1920’s. The 2020’s are here, and they want bloodsports.
((Fisk Bateman continued elsewhere.))
Catche thinks my squirrel is Fisk so here's my daily reminder that he is not.
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MethodicalSlacker
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The conversation died, and Jodi had to pick up the pen without benefiting from any potential distractions that would arise naturally from her classmates talking about things. She didn't know anymore whether they were just bewildered that she said anything at all, or that they thought that what she said was explicitly bad in some way. The teacher eventually moved on to another question, one that Jodi found somewhat insulting given that her own answer to the previous question answered it already,¹⁵ and, slowly, other people raised their hands. Fisk and Timothy seemed to tune out at roughly the same time she did.
She was careful not to drop her pen again during the rest of class. Once was an accident. Twice was clumsiness. Three times? That would have been a disgustingly "quirky" attempt at getting people to notice her. It was one thing to be seen as a know-it-all; it was another to be seen as a know-it-all who thought she was being cute. Even if, hypothetically, that played better than the know-it-all who kept to themselves, she didn't want to be that person. As absolutely inept as she was, socially, she knew that there was even further left to fall. There were people below even her¹⁶.
Later that day, when Jodi got home from school, she went through her pencil collection and found that there was absolutely no way that it was hers. She possessed no other pencils of that type, and she didn't even have the right kind of graphite¹⁷ for it. So, next time she had the class, she put it back in her desk. Whoever sat there in another section must have forgotten it. They'd grab it when she wasn't there.
Right?
Right.
[Jodi Hunter continued elsewhere.]
[15] - A tripped up way of thinking about a tangled situation, she realized, but there wasn't a better way of putting it that appeared in her mind at the moment. At the very least, Jodi knew, or at least felt, that her critique of the capitalist forces pushing the insurgency of SOTF in modern culture was simply viewed as an observation. Worst case scenario, everyone already knew, and she was just restating the obvious, and they were humoring her, and her place in the class rankings was being understood as a total and utter farce{a}.
{a} - Which it wasn't. Jodi worked hard for that spot, regardless of her personal feelings about it.
[16] - And she knew exactly who they{a} were.
{a} - He[1], really.
[1] - Even though he was in the grade above her. He had a reputation that preceded himself{1a}.
{1a} - coughJunjicough
[17] - Jodi agonized more than the average person over whether or not the part of pencils that actually did the writing was called lead or graphite. On the one hand, she knew it was probably closer to graphite when it came to its actual composition, but on the other hand, just because it was made of something didn't mean that it was going to be called that thing. Lead was poisonous, right? No way that was in pencils. Then again, maybe graphite was poisonous, too. Jodi would have to do research on her own later. For the time being, she'd alternate between words. That would probably confuse anyone who wasn't her, but that didn't apply, because they were her thoughts and she was the only one who could see them, and thus she knew exactly what she was thinking, whatever word she used. It wasn't like code, where documentation was needed{a}. Nobody was annotating her thoughts.
{a} - That was a code thing, right? She'd heard enough from people talking about computer science classes to make the claim openly, but not enough to do so with confidence.
She was careful not to drop her pen again during the rest of class. Once was an accident. Twice was clumsiness. Three times? That would have been a disgustingly "quirky" attempt at getting people to notice her. It was one thing to be seen as a know-it-all; it was another to be seen as a know-it-all who thought she was being cute. Even if, hypothetically, that played better than the know-it-all who kept to themselves, she didn't want to be that person. As absolutely inept as she was, socially, she knew that there was even further left to fall. There were people below even her¹⁶.
Later that day, when Jodi got home from school, she went through her pencil collection and found that there was absolutely no way that it was hers. She possessed no other pencils of that type, and she didn't even have the right kind of graphite¹⁷ for it. So, next time she had the class, she put it back in her desk. Whoever sat there in another section must have forgotten it. They'd grab it when she wasn't there.
Right?
Right.
[Jodi Hunter continued elsewhere.]
[15] - A tripped up way of thinking about a tangled situation, she realized, but there wasn't a better way of putting it that appeared in her mind at the moment. At the very least, Jodi knew, or at least felt, that her critique of the capitalist forces pushing the insurgency of SOTF in modern culture was simply viewed as an observation. Worst case scenario, everyone already knew, and she was just restating the obvious, and they were humoring her, and her place in the class rankings was being understood as a total and utter farce{a}.
{a} - Which it wasn't. Jodi worked hard for that spot, regardless of her personal feelings about it.
[16] - And she knew exactly who they{a} were.
{a} - He[1], really.
[1] - Even though he was in the grade above her. He had a reputation that preceded himself{1a}.
{1a} - coughJunjicough
[17] - Jodi agonized more than the average person over whether or not the part of pencils that actually did the writing was called lead or graphite. On the one hand, she knew it was probably closer to graphite when it came to its actual composition, but on the other hand, just because it was made of something didn't mean that it was going to be called that thing. Lead was poisonous, right? No way that was in pencils. Then again, maybe graphite was poisonous, too. Jodi would have to do research on her own later. For the time being, she'd alternate between words. That would probably confuse anyone who wasn't her, but that didn't apply, because they were her thoughts and she was the only one who could see them, and thus she knew exactly what she was thinking, whatever word she used. It wasn't like code, where documentation was needed{a}. Nobody was annotating her thoughts.
{a} - That was a code thing, right? She'd heard enough from people talking about computer science classes to make the claim openly, but not enough to do so with confidence.