The Pnictogen Wing

The Pnictogen Wing has two dragons. It's like I've got my own dragon counterpart, and my sibling Frisk has theirs. There's Kel the Purple, whom (as I've said in the past) we think is both a smol derg and a sentient electron, and is apparently quite young in spirit, which is giving us some difficulties. Just how do you teach a little kid about the Shoah, for example? No kidding, that's one of our worries. Anyway, Kel is "my" dragon, whereas Frisk's dragon Orpiment or Pim seems quite a bit more mature. She feels herself to be bigger, but also much vaguely defined, largely because Frisk has been stubbornly resistant in the past to the mystical and the fantastical. Lately she's been feeling more centered and more comfortable with being at the front of the system, and (like Frisk) Pim has a keenness for human politics.

Thus it was Pim, in conjunction with Frisk, who last night came up with an argument for why you should vote for Joe Biden even if he's really senile or ailing or whatever's supposed to be wrong with him. (I've noticed that the people calling for him to step down have gotten very imprecise as to why, and inclined to be citing popularity polls instead.) Pim says it doesn't matter! There's a logical argument for sticking with Joe Biden that's completely irrelevant to his political belief or indeed his competence.

It runs like this. It's a consequence of the "collective oligarchist" principle we talked about yesterday, the observation that all major offices of any power in the United States come with an expectation they'll have an unseen, unelected staff managing things along with the actual office-holder. For the President of the United States, I imagine that this population of assistants and aides must be in the thousands at least, both official and unofficial. (I think we've all just kind of accepted that Presidents are gonna have some obscure best friends, Bebe Rebozo or Harlan Crow types, who are secretly party to every decision.)

So if Joe Biden is non compos mentis, that private army of helpers is running things, not Biden. Pim argues that it'd be folly to disrupt this delicate situation. It takes time for such an internal organization to congeal, and now they're fully assembled and doing a reasonable job of running things with Biden as figurehead. What happens if Trump's elected? All that delicate and functional machinery of government gets ripped up, and a new gang moves in. Even if the GOP were known for competent governance, it would take them time to build up their own "court" around Donald Trump's presence in the Oval Office. In practice that wouldn't matter. The Democrats are good at dull competence, and the GOP...isn't, and doesn't want to be.

I'm convinced, and I hope you are! If we're really facing a battle between competing senile guys, continuity makes more sense. The country needs some breathing space for dealing with this unprecedented situation. Switching to another senile guy isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure!

~Chara

Have you had differences between headmates (in personality, beliefs, desires, etc) that you've struggled to reconcile?

(laughs uproariously) And how! The Pnictogen Wing is characterized by the attempt to reconcile diametrically opposed personalities and forces. We have Christian headmates, Muslim headmates, Jewish headmates, atheist headmates, and I'm sure that's not exhausted that list. We have gods and demons. ~Chara

Hassan of Serenity, while she retains the title of Assassin in our system, is quite clear in Fate/Grand Order that she no longer wishes to kill, and we honor that—although I suspect that Serenity still reserves the privilege of scaring the crap out of people >_> We're not entirely sure what she gets up to, if I'm honest. Magical combat with other Heroic Spirits is a somewhat different matter, although that's a problematical one too—that gets into our general bad feelings about the corporate Fate/ empire, and I won't get into that right now.

We very much would like to educate ourselves properly on her people, the Nizari Isma'ili state founded by Hasan-i Sabbah in the 11th century C.E., centered chiefly around a cluster of strongholds in Persia. The chief of these was Alamut Castle in the mountainous territory just south of the Black Sea, in what's now the Qazvin Province of Iran. This remarkable political entity managed to retain its integrity for about two centuries despite its minuscule size compared to much more powerful neighbors, partly through selective terrorism and assassination. They came to be known as the "Order of Assassins" and the "Hashasheen" and from what I can tell, they've been a prodigious inspiration in Western culture for the production of utter bullshit. Marco Polo spread a bunch of crap, it got picked up and romanticized by later writers, and now you can play a bunch of video games (I haven't played a single one) inspired—in the very loosest and most generous sense of "inspired"—by the people whom Hassan of Serenity once helped to keep safe, as a trained assassin.

I think she might actually be curious about "Assassin's Creed", if I'm honest.

Imagine being from Persia in the 12th century C.E.! I have a difficult time imagining it. Unfortunately, so does Serenity herself; her memories are extremely cloudy, and to be honest we're not sure how any of our Heroic Spirits have come to feel that they have such a secure lodging with us. We're not exactly mages. In any case, doing homework about Serenity's people (and about all our historical and semi-historical introjects) is one of the many lengthy tasks ahead of the Pnictogen Wing.

(sighs) how we'll manage, I don't know

~Chara of Pnictogen