#fiction #tv #fantasy #horror

Warning: Contains minor spoilers

The good thing about having low expectations is that you set yourself up to be pleasantly surprised. I didn’t even have high expectations of The Mandalorian and Grogu and still it managed to disappoint. Castlevania was the reverse. I picked it for some light background entertainment and it delivered on that, but also a surprising amount more for an animated television series based on a venerable videogame franchise about vampire hunters. Like the videogames that inspired it, Castlevania tells the story of a member of the monster hunting Belmont family as they square off against the forces of evil, usually represented by Dracula. This time the honour falls to Trevor Belmont, last surviving member of the Wallachian branch of the family. Down on his luck, excommunicated and roving from town to town to drown his sorrows in ale, Trevor does not start off as the hero the world needs to stop Dracula’s war against humanity. One key arc across Castlevania’s four seasons is Trevor’s fairly typical hero’s journey from cynical vagrant to competent saviour

All of this is executed in a visual style that draws heavily on its videogame lineage. The animation is vibrant, violent and visceral. The combat is fast, flashy, and familiar to anyone who has every played a fantasy roleplaying game (RPG). Castlevania is not for the faint of heart. It is the sort of show where half the scenes have blood splattered over them and people’s intestines have a tendency to escape from their bodies. Yet for a series that revels in gothic horror and videogame violence, Castlevania also contains surprising meditations on damnation and redemption, agency and fate, cruelty and kindness. And for a story set in medieval Europe, the cast is pleasantly diverse in terms of ethnicity, sexuality and gender. It’s come for the gore, stay for the existentialism.

Castlevania is a story told in four parts, its corresponding seasons really not meant to stand on their own. The short first season only serves to introduce the story and the main characters, setting the scene for Dracula’s war against humanity to avenge his murdered wife. Season two sees our heroes vanquish Dracula. A surprising move, to kill the main villain only halfway through a series, this creates the space and impetus for the remaining characters to develop and find new purpose in the aftermath of Dracula’s defeat. Without the gravitational pull of Dracula holding friends and foes together, characters are scattered to the winds, confronted with their inner demons and the fact that defeating the devil does not in fact exorcise all evil from the world. Season four is the grand finale, culminating not only in a final epic bossfight, but also our heroes’ search for purpose. Throughout there are nods to Dante’s Divine Comedy, with season three especially representing a descent into Purgatory for most of our protagonists, and season four their ascension back into the land of the living.

Our heroes are Trevor Belmont, disgraced monster hunter, Sypha Benades, mage and scholar, and Alucard, son of Dracula and therefore half vampire. Opposing them are Dracula and his war council composed of vampire aristocracy, as well as two human sorcerers, Isaac and Hector, who have their reasons for siding with the vampires against humanity. Yet the war council is riven with dissent, animosity and plotting, most prominently by Carmilla of Styria who has her own reasons for joining the fight. A depressed and disinterested Dracula is unable to either exercise control, or prosecute the war with the zeal expected of him, creating a power vacuum in which other players seek to make their moves. With Dracula’s defeat at the end of season two, both heroes and villains must discover who they are, and who they might become.

Sympathy for the devil

Casting Dracula as a vengeful but also depressed and mournful widower is one way in which Castlevania complicates the straightforward ‘good versus evil’ story of humans against vampires. This Dracula is not evil incarnate, driven by cruelty or power for its own sake, but a man whose wife was brutally murdered by the Church. Eradicating all humans in response is not exactly reasonable and Dracula falls well within the category of ‘men who should have gone to therapy’, but it nonetheless frames his motivations as driven by something more human and understandable than mere bloodthirst, even if the dead wife trope is worn and problematic. At least Castlevania has the decency not to turn the vengeful widower into its hero, unlike some recent popular movie franchises.

The nuance is not limited to Dracula, but extends to the show’s other vampires and demons. Dracula’s night creatures (souls summoned from Hell into demon bodies) are introduced as simple rampaging monsters, but are revealed to have capacity for thought, reflection and suffering. We are prompted to wonder whether their predisposition for murder is really their own, or that of the masters who summon them and give them purpose, and whether under different circumstances they might not be capable of construction as well as destruction. But the most interesting and complex character is Carmilla: a female vampire leader on Dracula’s war council. She is Machiavellian, cynical and power-hungry, and yet as we discover more about her, it is impossible not to feel sympathetic towards her. Carmilla is a woman who has suffered at the hands of a deeply patriarchal and misogynist society, ruled by “stupid old men” she despises but who also hold power over her even now that she has vampiric powers. Within the context of medieval Europe, she is the logic of ‘girlboss feminism’ incarnate: the philosophy that if you cannot dismantle the structures of oppression, your only path to emancipation lies in the accumulation of power. But because there are always men with more power than you, complete security can only be achieved through complete world domination. Driven by this logic, Carmilla’s ambitions gradually but inexorably expand as the series progresses, starting with the desire to take over Dracula’s castle but ending with plans to subjugate all the kingdoms of Europe. And it is hard to fault Carmilla for her analysis, even if she does turn into a megalomaniac villain who repulses even her closest allies, because this is after all a story that started with a strong woman being burned at the stake merely for being more learned than a bunch of insecure and deeply reactionary men.

Hell is other people

The nuanced representation of Castlevania’s vampires is mirrored in its ambivalent view of humanity. The Wallachia of Castlevania is a place where life is violent and as per Thomas Hobbes often solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. Neither just victims or heroes, much of the violence and treachery we see is inflicted on humans by humans, not any supernatural creatures. The first act of violence in Castlevania is after all the murder of Dracula’s wife by the overzealous clergy of Targovishte, and the suffering, pain and death inflicted by humans does not end there. Season three presents the nadir in this regard for heroes Sypha and Trevor, as they are confronted with some deeply unpleasant characters not just among their enemies, but also among their supposed allies.

Suffering is everywhere in Castlevania, and for some characters this means humanity is beyond redemption. Dracula’s war council includes two humans, Isaac and Hector, who after being hurt and cast out from their communities have thrown in their lot with the vampires because they believe the world is better off without humans at all. During their travels, Trevor and Sypha similarly come across people who have either gone over to the dark side of Dracula, or concluded that there is simply no point in going on living. The sense of futility is heightened because the onslaught of vampires and demons across Wallachia means that while some people may survive individually, communities are fractured and broken. It is the social web that humans rely on for meaningful existence beyond survival that is lost.

Nor does faith offer solace. Castlevania’s Christianity is that of a vengeful Old Testament God, with punishingly strict rules on sin and damnation. If lying to save yourself from being tortured to death can land you in Hell, then what hope is there for anyone? And yet, while most characters in Castlevania assume they are damned to go to hell, their reality is equally so grim that it leads some of them to wonder what difference there really is between a life or afterlife of suffering.

Beyond good and evil

You cannot order a society based on a moral doctrine that condemns everyone equally to hell. If you are damned no matter how small the sin, you might as well be selfish while you can. Castlevania definitely has no love to spare for the Church as an institution or for Christian doctrine, but this does not mean it has no sense of good and evil. It is just not based on theology. Instead, in Castlevania the greatest sin is stasis: the inability to grow and change. It is the characters who through introspection or action learn to exercise agency, develop, and adapt who ultimately survive. Our hero Trevor Belmont is the most obvious example, but Castlevania’s most interesting story belongs to Isaac, the erstwhile servant of Dracula turned saviour of demons and men. If Trevor’s arc is the traditional hero’s journey, Isaac much more closely follows in the footsteps of Dante, passing through his personal purgatory before emerging transformed on the other side.

Contrary to our human heroes, Castlevania’s vampires are unable to change, and that is what causes their demise. In a way, its vampires can be seen as the ultimate existentialists, thrown into an existence they cannot change not once, but twice. Born as human, reborn as vampire. Neither birth is a choice, and if the human life is short and full of suffering, vampiric life is an eternity of hunger spent in darkness. Castlevania asks whether vampires are indeed in some sense beyond good and evil, because if preying on humans is necessary for survival, then is it really a moral choice at all? But the consequence of being placed beyond human morality, of being damned by definition, is that vampires also cannot transform, either themselves or the world. This point is made explicitly: if for humans the greatest virtue is growth, for vampires it is stability and stasis. A world that, like vampires themselves, never changes and never dies. An undead existence that is indeed neither dead nor alive, but just an eternal now, though not in the mindful sense.

The lesson Castlevania imparts that we are only truly alive when we purposefully act in the world, not in isolation but together with others. It is agency grounded in both introspection and cooperation. I would like to say that the show also promotes agency for the sake of kindness towards others, but while it points in that direction towards the end, it has racked up too tremendous a body count to sustain that a pure message of kindness. It is an animated series about vampire hunters after all, not a treatise of existentialist philosophy or a socialist instruction manual. But for a show about vampires and violence, it has surprising depth and rewards viewing with an eye for more than just the epic battles, blood and gore that it shows you on the surface.

Notes & Suggestions

• Aoko Matsuda wrote an excellent short story about the trope of the woman who must die for the sake of the plot and/or the male protagonist, which you can read in Granta.
• It has been too long since I read it myself, so I drew from this blog for a more detailed analysis of how Castlevania draws inspiration from Dante’s Divine Comedy.
• Castlevania interest in what happens after the villain has been vanquished is shared with Loki and The Mandalorian, both of which also observe that evil is not so easily rooted from the world. Each of these series take a different perspective on this theme. Castlevania is a story of personal growth, Loki of ongoing struggle and transformation, and The Mandalorian of retribution. What all of them share is the recognition that in the fight for justice, there is neither final defeat nor victory.

Rise of Reason: Part 10- Unity

The fall of the Red City ended the period in which the survival of the Enclave of Reason depended primarily upon military victory, but it did not resolve the political problems created by more than a century of expansion. The state that emerged from the Triple Alliance War bore little resemblance to the mountain society that had opened the Gate generations earlier. Its territories now included the Vale of Providence, the former lands of the Forest People, incorporated Granitefist fortress districts, associated southern cities and agricultural provinces, the enormous commercial population centered on the Red City, and a growing network of river settlements and trading partners extending toward the Reed wetlands. Some of these regions had joined voluntarily, others through gradual cultural assimilation, and still others after military defeat. Their economies differed, their laws had developed independently, and their populations retained distinct languages, religious traditions, political customs, and historical grievances. The thirty years following the siege of the Red City were therefore remembered not as a period of further conquest, but as the Era of Unity, during which the Enclave attempted to convert military dominance into a political order capable of surviving without permanent occupation.

The challenge was particularly acute because the government could not simply reproduce the institutions of the original Vale everywhere. The political system that had evolved from Wesley's monarchy depended upon a balance between the hereditary crown, the Great Civic Council, local representative bodies, professional institutions, and a large administrative class accustomed to written law and quantitative record keeping. Many recently incorporated regions possessed none of these traditions. Imposing them immediately would have required a bureaucracy larger than the Enclave possessed and risked transforming integration into a visible system of foreign rule. The policy that developed instead was gradual and deliberately practical. Existing municipal councils, clan authorities, courts, and commercial institutions were retained where they could be reconciled with common Enclave law, while functions that affected the larger realm—military organization, interregional trade, major infrastructure, currency, foreign affairs, taxation standards, and the movement of people and goods—were progressively centralized.

This arrangement was intended not only to make government easier but to reduce the conditions under which regional elites could organize future secession. The Enclave had learned from the Triple Alliance that military occupation alone could not ensure loyalty. A province remained politically dangerous if its economy, government, army, and communications could function independently from the rest of the state. The postwar reforms consequently created what later historians described as institutional interdependence. Roads crossed old borders rather than terminating at them. Regional grain reserves were incorporated into a common emergency system. Judges could appeal cases into higher courts outside their home provinces. Students from newly incorporated territories received places in universities and technical schools elsewhere in the realm. Officers were routinely assigned to units recruited from regions other than their own, while no conquered territory was permitted to maintain a large independent standing army under purely local command. These measures made rebellion increasingly difficult, but they did so without relying primarily upon visible garrisons or punitive administration. A merchant in the Red City, a mine owner in the Granitefist territories, and an agricultural council in the south gradually acquired material interests in the same transportation, legal, financial, and commercial systems.

Reconstruction of the Red City and the Northern Settlement

The Red City presented the largest immediate reconstruction problem. Its population had survived the siege with less physical destruction than many observers had expected, but the war had dislocated trade, damaged outlying agriculture, emptied portions of the treasury, and removed the political leadership that had organized the Triple Alliance. The provisional government established after the surrender initially operated under close Enclave supervision, but the occupation authorities avoided replacing the lower administrative structure. Tax collectors, market inspectors, municipal engineers, warehouse officials, judges, and neighborhood councils remained necessary to govern a city whose population exceeded that of the entire early Enclave by many multiples.

Political restructuring concentrated on preventing the reappearance of a centralized military-commercial oligarchy capable of directing the city's enormous resources independently of the wider state. The old Red ruling council had combined control of taxation, military mobilization, commercial licensing, and foreign policy in a relatively small group of powerful families and senior officials. The postwar settlement divided these functions. Municipal councils retained responsibility for local taxation, markets, sanitation, urban construction, and commercial regulation, but military affairs and foreign relations passed permanently to the wider Enclave government. Representation in the Great Civic Council was expanded gradually as Red districts completed censuses and administrative reforms, giving the city's population influence within the system that had defeated it rather than leaving it governed indefinitely as an occupied possession.

The commercial elite survived more completely than the former political leadership. Enclave planners regarded the destruction of Red trade networks as economically irrational, and trading houses that accepted the postwar settlement were permitted to retain warehouses, ships, capital, and foreign contacts. Their privileges, however, changed substantially. Exclusive licenses over particular regions were abolished, internal customs barriers were reduced, and independent cities could no longer be compelled to trade through Red intermediaries. The result was a decline in the political power of older merchant families even as overall commercial activity eventually surpassed prewar levels.

Reconstruction in the Granitefist territories followed a different pattern. The mountain kingdoms had suffered more direct physical destruction, including damaged fortifications, flooded valleys, abandoned mines, destroyed roads, and the disruption of irrigation and water-storage systems. The Enclave had strong practical reasons to rebuild the region quickly. Granitefist mines supplied materials essential to metallurgy and artillery production, while mountain roads connected the central territories to the north.

The controversial destruction of water infrastructure during the Triple Alliance War complicated reconstruction. In the Varren Valley and several smaller districts, Enclave engineers participated directly in rebuilding dams they or their predecessors had destroyed. Compensation was provided to some communities, although the amounts rarely satisfied local claims. The rebuilding program became politically significant because it provided a tangible demonstration that the Enclave did not intend to leave conquered territories economically crippled once military necessity had passed.

Former hostile kingdoms were not all incorporated identically. Deepwell, whose defection had materially assisted the Enclave, retained broad internal autonomy and gained privileged representation in northern administrative bodies. High Cairn and Westbarrow, which had remained neutral, preserved most of their prewar institutions. Kingdoms that had participated heavily in the Triple Alliance accepted tighter restrictions on independent military forces but generally retained dynastic or council leadership in ceremonial and local governmental roles. Southvault, Stonewake, and Ironmouth remained directly integrated Enclave territories, though their local councils became increasingly Granitefist in composition as wartime administration receded.

By the end of the first postwar decade, the northern mountains had become economically more integrated than they had ever been politically. New roads linked mining districts to Red manufacturing centers and the agricultural territories farther south. Barges carried ore down improved river channels, while grain moved in the opposite direction. The former military frontier increasingly functioned as a commercial corridor.

The Internal Trade System and the Merchant Rising

One of the most consequential postwar reforms was the gradual elimination of internal tariffs and protected regional trading monopolies. Earlier Merdunian commerce had been shaped by political fragmentation. A shipment traveling a few hundred miles might cross several jurisdictions, each imposing tolls, licensing requirements, storage fees, and compulsory use of local intermediaries. Merchants who controlled access to rare imports could therefore earn enormous premiums, particularly in isolated cities.

The expansion of the Enclave created an opportunity to replace this system with a common internal market. Over approximately fifteen years, customs stations between incorporated territories were removed or converted into census and inspection posts. Standard weights and measures became mandatory for interregional contracts, Enclave coinage was accepted throughout the realm, and courts were required to recognize commercial judgments issued in other provinces. River tolls were standardized, while merchants received legal protections allowing them to operate outside their home regions without securing permission from every local authority.

The reforms lowered prices dramatically for many manufactured and imported goods. Granitefist metal became available in southern towns without passing through several intermediary merchants. Reed products reached Red markets through multiple competing routes. Agricultural surpluses could move toward shortage areas without local guilds controlling resale. Consumers benefited, as did manufacturers who gained access to much larger markets.

A section of the established merchant class lost heavily.

The resulting Merchant Rising, which occurred during the second decade after the war, was less a popular rebellion than an organized attempt by several powerful commercial houses to reverse the free-trade reforms. The center of opposition lay in the Red City, where merchant families had historically profited from their ability to control access between inland markets and eastern trade routes. Several Granitefist and southern trading houses joined them, particularly firms whose wealth depended upon regional monopolies rather than production or long-distance commerce.

The dispute began through conventional political means. Merchant associations petitioned the Great Civic Council for the restoration of licensing restrictions, arguing that unrestricted trade exposed established businesses to ruin and allowed distant firms to undermine local employment. Some complaints had merit. Crafts and transport services organized around the old tariff system experienced substantial disruption, and the transition toward larger integrated markets produced winners and losers unevenly.

The crisis escalated when a group of major houses refused to remit commercial taxes and closed several privately controlled warehouses to government inspectors. In the Red City, hired guards occupied two former customs compounds and prevented independent merchants from unloading goods at adjoining docks. Organizers apparently expected municipal workers, dock laborers, and smaller traders to support the action.

The broader uprising never materialized. Many dockworkers and independent merchants had benefited from increased trade volume, while consumers strongly opposed a return to the higher prices associated with the old system. The Red municipal government refused to endorse the merchants, and the Great Civic Council declared the seizure of the docks an unlawful attempt to restore private control over public commerce.

The confrontation ended within days. Civic militia and regular troops surrounded the occupied compounds, and most guards surrendered after guarantees were offered against collective punishment. Several leading merchants were arrested on charges of armed obstruction and tax evasion. Their businesses were not generally confiscated; instead, fines, temporary loss of commercial charters, and individual prosecutions were used to separate political resistance from ordinary economic activity.

The speed with which the Merchant Rising collapsed revealed the degree to which the postwar economy had already changed. Commercial elites remained wealthy and influential, but control of trade routes no longer gave individual families the political leverage it had under the fragmented prewar system. The event also reinforced the government's preference for regulating markets rather than replacing them. The response was directed at restoring competition and public control of infrastructure, not eliminating private commerce.

The Scimitar Frontier and the Eastern Trade

The postwar settlement did not eliminate armed conflict everywhere. The fragmentation produced by Operation Shattered Glass persisted across the former Scimitar sphere, where competing riding houses, local confederations, and successor states continued to contest grazing territory, wells, trade routes, and claims to the title of First Rider. Kharan Veyr retained influence for several years after the Red defeat, but his authority never recovered sufficiently to recreate the unified threat that had existed before the Triple Alliance.

For the Enclave, this transformed the southern problem from one of existential warfare to persistent frontier insecurity. Scimitar factions rarely attempted to seize fortified Enclave territory permanently. Instead, mounted groups attacked caravans, isolated farms, livestock herds, river crossings, and lightly defended market settlements. The size of these raids varied from a few dozen riders to several thousand during periods when temporary alliances formed among neighboring clans.

The Enclave gradually developed a frontier system designed to make raiding less profitable rather than attempting to eradicate it entirely. Major trade roads were patrolled regularly, caravan schedules were coordinated so that smaller merchants could travel in larger protected groups, and fortified waystations were constructed within a day's travel of one another along vulnerable routes. Watchtowers relayed warnings toward mobile cavalry and mounted-infantry units stationed at regional centers. Insurance associations, some privately organized and others publicly supported, compensated merchants for losses and reduced the economic shock of individual raids.

Military expeditions into Scimitar territory continued occasionally, usually in response to particularly destructive attacks, but the government avoided large-scale occupation. Decades of experience had demonstrated that the administrative cost of attempting to govern the mobile pastoral heartland would exceed its likely economic value. Enclave policy instead encouraged trade with factions willing to respect caravan routes and supplied limited support to local rulers whose interests aligned with southern stability.

The result was an uneasy frontier rather than a conquered province. Raiding never disappeared during the Era of Unity, but its scale gradually declined as major commerce shifted toward better-protected roads and river transport and as Scimitar factions exhausted themselves through continued competition.

Relations with the Reeds developed in almost the opposite direction. The wartime cooperation that emerged during the collapse of Red naval power expanded into a dense network of commercial and diplomatic agreements. Because no single Reed government represented the entire wetland region, treaties were concluded with individual federations, river councils, port settlements, and trading associations. This produced a complicated diplomatic landscape but also prevented relations from depending upon one central ruler.

Reed pilots became increasingly common on Enclave river vessels, while Enclave physicians, metalworkers, and merchants established permanent communities at several wetland ports. Reed-controlled trading cities that had formerly been subordinate to Red commercial interests grew rapidly because they could now negotiate directly with markets farther west.

The eastern trade also widened the Enclave's geographic knowledge. Reed merchants had connections extending beyond the wetlands toward coastal regions and peoples previously known to the Enclave only through secondhand accounts. Maps produced during the later Unity period increasingly depicted coastlines, islands, and sea routes rather than ending at the boundaries of the continental states that had dominated earlier Enclave strategy.

The Great Flux

The same movement of people and goods that enriched the postwar realm also created vulnerabilities unprecedented in earlier Merdunian history. Roads shortened travel times between populations that had previously interacted only intermittently. Barges transported passengers and cargo across entire regions, armies and laborers moved between provinces, and rapidly growing cities drew food from increasingly distant sources. Diseases that might once have remained confined to a valley or market district could now travel hundreds of miles before authorities understood that an outbreak had begun.

The most serious epidemic of the Unity period occurred approximately eighteen years after the fall of the Red City and became known simply as the Great Flux. Surviving descriptions suggest an acute intestinal disease transmitted primarily through contaminated water or food. Symptoms included severe diarrhea, vomiting, muscular weakness, intense thirst, and rapid dehydration. Many patients died within several days of the onset of severe symptoms, sometimes while remaining mentally alert almost until death.

The earliest documented cases appeared in an eastern river port engaged heavily in Reed trade, although later historians have been unable to determine whether the disease originated in the wetlands, arrived from farther overseas, or had existed at low levels within the Enclave beforehand. What made the epidemic extraordinary was not necessarily the novelty of the organism but the transportation network available to it. Infected travelers and contaminated water supplies carried the disease rapidly along river and road corridors.

Within months, outbreaks were reported in the Red metropolitan region, several former Forest towns, southern market centers, and Granitefist mining communities. Mortality varied greatly. Settlements using isolated springs experienced relatively limited outbreaks, while densely populated towns dependent upon rivers or shallow wells suffered heavily. Modern reconstructions suggest that several percent of the population of the affected regions may have died, although contemporary figures are too inconsistent to support precise totals.

The epidemic initially produced familiar responses: prayer, flight, isolation of the sick, closure of markets, and restrictions on travel. The Enclave's administrative traditions nevertheless allowed a more systematic investigation to develop rapidly. Physicians were required to submit standardized reports listing patient location, water source, occupation, household contacts, and date of symptom onset. These records were copied and compared across districts.

One of the earliest important observations came from the Red City, where physicians noticed that neighborhoods supplied by two particular river intakes suffered far higher mortality than districts drawing water from deep wells or an older covered aqueduct. Similar patterns appeared elsewhere. When authorities temporarily closed contaminated intakes, ordered water boiled, and distributed supplies from protected sources, new cases declined.

These observations strengthened an idea that had existed within Enclave medicine for generations: that some diseases were transmitted through material agents too small to be detected directly by ordinary senses. Earlier physicians had recognized that cleanliness, boiled water, isolation, and instrument washing could reduce disease, but explanations ranged from chemical contamination to invisible poisons or disturbances in air quality.

Advances in optics during the Unity period allowed the question to be investigated more directly. Lens grinders had developed increasingly powerful magnifying instruments for metallurgy, textile inspection, and natural philosophy. During the Great Flux, several physicians examined samples of contaminated water and bodily fluids using compound and high-magnification single-lens instruments. They observed large numbers of minute moving forms that were absent or much less common in protected water supplies.

These observations did not immediately produce a complete germ theory. Scholars disagreed over whether the organisms caused disease, arose as a consequence of contamination, or merely flourished in the same conditions. The organisms also varied between samples, and existing microscopes could not resolve many structures clearly enough for reliable classification.

The epidemic nevertheless produced one of the most important experiments of early Enclave medicine. Physicians at a hospital outside the Red City divided water from a contaminated source into several preparations. Some was used untreated, some boiled, some passed through increasingly fine sand and ceramic filtration, and some both filtered and heated. The treated samples showed far fewer visible organisms and were associated with substantially fewer new cases among controlled groups of animals and, later, among human communities supplied through emergency systems. The experiments lacked many safeguards expected of later science, but repeated observations across several cities produced sufficiently consistent results to change public-health policy.

By the end of the epidemic, most leading Enclave physicians accepted some form of minute-life transmission theory, the precursor to later microbial medicine. The theory held that at least some diseases were produced or carried by living entities capable of multiplying in water, food, wounds, or the bodies of infected people. It did not claim that all illness had a microbial cause, and many details remained incorrect, but it established a research program that could be tested experimentally.

The public-health consequences were immediate. Municipal water systems were redesigned to separate drinking intakes from waste discharge. Sand filtration beds became common in larger cities, and boiling orders became standard during suspected outbreaks. Hospitals adopted more rigorous instrument heating and handwashing procedures. Sewer construction accelerated, particularly in the Red City, where dense population made open waste channels increasingly dangerous. Local authorities received legal power to close contaminated wells, inspect food markets, isolate certain patients, and require physicians to report clusters of unusual disease.

The Great Flux ultimately killed large numbers of people, but it also produced an institutional transformation comparable in some respects to the earlier effects of the Sequester. Disease became increasingly understood not simply as misfortune to be treated after it appeared, but as a measurable process whose transmission could be interrupted through engineering, observation, and administration.

Political Integration and the Architecture of Unity

The epidemic reinforced the larger project of political integration because it demonstrated how dependent regions had become upon one another. A contaminated river in one province could produce illness several hundred miles away; conversely, medical knowledge developed in one city could be printed and distributed across the entire realm within weeks. The government increasingly used such examples to promote a civic identity that emphasized membership in a shared system rather than descent from a particular people.

This effort did not attempt to erase regional culture. Granitefist languages continued to be used in local courts and schools, Red festivals survived occupation, Forest traditions remained prominent in many central districts, and southern cities preserved their own municipal customs. The state instead concentrated on creating areas in which all citizens encountered common institutions. Elementary education included a standardized civic curriculum alongside local history. Military service mixed recruits from different provinces. Universities admitted students from across the realm. Commercial law and measurement systems were standardized, while infrastructure projects were deliberately designed to connect regions whose earlier economies had faced in different directions.

Representation in the Great Civic Council expanded substantially during the Unity period. Red delegates became one of the largest blocs, while Granitefist districts, southern provinces, and several associated cities received greater representation as census systems matured. The resulting council was more politically contentious than the institution that had governed the smaller Enclave. Merchant interests, agricultural districts, military constituencies, engineers, religious authorities, and regional representatives increasingly disagreed over taxation and spending.

This complexity was considered a feature as much as a defect. Enclave political theorists argued that a rebellion was easiest when a region possessed a unified elite whose interests diverged sharply from the central government. The council system instead encouraged elites from each territory to pursue influence within the wider state. A Red merchant seeking favorable shipping policy had reason to ally with Reed traders and southern agricultural representatives; Granitefist mining interests negotiated with Red manufacturers; Forest districts concerned with timber policy found common cause with naval planners. Political conflict therefore increasingly occurred across regional lines rather than simply between conquered territories and the Vale.

Military organization followed the same logic. Regional units retained some traditions and symbols but were incorporated into a common command structure. Officers were transferred among provinces, logistics were centralized, and arsenals supplied weapons according to standardized calibers. No single province possessed enough independent military infrastructure to wage a prolonged war against the rest of the state without first recreating systems that had been deliberately made interdependent.

The process was not free of coercion. Taxes remained compulsory, military service could be required during emergencies, and several separatist organizations were surveilled or prohibited. Yet compared with traditional systems of imperial control based upon permanent occupation and tribute extraction, the Enclave relied increasingly upon incentives, institutional participation, and economic dependence. The objective was to make unity materially advantageous enough that revolt became both costly and unattractive.

The Turn Toward the Sea

By the third decade of Unity, Enclave strategic thought began to shift away from the continental problems that had dominated its history since the opening of the Gate. The nearby political landscape had changed profoundly. The Red City was incorporated, the Granitefist kingdoms no longer represented a unified military threat, and the Scimitar remained fragmented. Further expansion overland promised diminishing returns and greater administrative complexity.

The eastern trade suggested an alternative.

Information gathered from Reed merchants and coastal travelers indicated that substantial populations existed beyond the familiar continental system, including islands, distant coastal states, and trading societies connected by sea routes. Some possessed goods unavailable within the Enclave, while others controlled maritime passages through which valuable materials already reached Reed markets indirectly.

The Enclave possessed little tradition of true seagoing warfare. Its River Service had developed for shallow waterways, transport, and escort, while Red naval experience centered largely on rivers, estuaries, and near-coastal commerce. The postwar government therefore began a deliberate program of naval development.

Former Red shipyards were expanded and placed under mixed civilian and military administration. Reed shipwrights were invited to contribute expertise in shallow-draft construction and wetland navigation, while Red merchants supplied knowledge of larger hulls and commercial rigging. Enclave engineers concentrated on structural standardization, artillery mounting, navigation, and the production of ships that could remain at sea for longer periods without frequent resupply.

Hull construction gradually shifted toward larger framed vessels capable of carrying substantial cargo and artillery. Improved sawmills allowed timbers to be cut more consistently, while standardized iron fittings strengthened critical joints. Experiments with protective copper and other metal coverings were conducted but remained too expensive for widespread use. Sail plans became more complex as shipbuilders attempted to balance speed, cargo capacity, and the ability to maneuver against unfavorable winds.

Navigation received equal attention. Magnetic compasses were improved and standardized, while astronomers produced more accurate tables for estimating latitude from celestial observations. Longitude remained much more difficult, and long voyages continued to depend heavily upon dead reckoning, currents, coastal landmarks, and experienced pilots. Government-sponsored survey expeditions mapped coastlines, depths, shoals, tides, and reliable anchorages.

Naval artillery developed from existing land weapons but required substantial modification. Heavy siege cannon placed too high in a ship made it unstable, while recoil could damage hull structures. Shipwrights therefore experimented with lower gun positions, reinforced decks, lighter naval cannon, and methods for controlling recoil. The emerging warships remained crude compared with later naval vessels, but they represented a major departure from the small armed barges of the earlier River Service.

Permanent dockyards, ropeworks, sail lofts, naval warehouses, and training institutions appeared along the eastern waterways and coast. A formal naval officer corps developed, drawing heavily from Red maritime families, Reed pilots, and Enclave engineers. The composition of this institution itself reflected the political integration of the preceding decades: the state's next great military arm could not have been created from the original Vale population alone.

The immediate purpose of the fleet was commercial protection and suppression of piracy rather than overseas conquest. Strategic documents from the later Unity period, however, increasingly discussed the sea as the natural direction of future exploration and expansion.

Early Steam and Combustion Experiments

The same decades produced the first sustained experiments with artificial power sources that did not depend directly upon muscle, flowing water, or wind. These efforts emerged from several existing technologies rather than from a sudden conceptual breakthrough. Enclave workshops already possessed relatively advanced metal casting, pumps, valves, pressure pipes, cannon boring, and mathematical knowledge of pressure and volume. Mines in the Granitefist territories also faced a persistent practical problem: water accumulated in deeper workings faster than conventional pumps could always remove it economically.

Natural philosophers had long understood that heated water produced expanding vapor and that cooling vapor could create partial vacuum. Earlier devices demonstrated these effects in small vessels, but they produced little useful work. The improvement of pressure-resistant metal containers during artillery development made larger experiments possible.

During the final decade of Unity, engineers constructed several experimental pumping devices in which steam was admitted into a cylinder or chamber and then cooled, using the resulting pressure difference to move a piston or draw water. Early machines leaked badly, consumed enormous quantities of fuel, and required constant maintenance. Several boilers ruptured during testing, leading to regulations requiring pressure vessels to be tested remotely before installation.

The first machines capable of performing sustained useful work were employed experimentally at Granitefist mines, where inefficiency mattered less than the ability to remove water from workings that would otherwise have been abandoned. Even these devices were not yet economically competitive with water-powered pumps in locations where streams were available. Their importance lay in demonstrating that heat could be converted repeatedly into mechanical motion without requiring an animal, flowing river, or turning sail.

Parallel experiments investigated controlled combustion more directly. Gunpowder provided an obvious example of rapidly expanding gas, and several inventors attempted to use small explosions to drive pistons or mechanical weights. Most such devices were destructive, inefficient, or difficult to cycle reliably. Other experiments used burning oils or alcohol vapors, but ignition and fuel control remained primitive.

The practical future clearly favored steam rather than explosive combustion at this stage. Metallurgy and precision machining were still insufficient for compact high-pressure engines, and fuel consumption remained a major limitation. Nevertheless, the conceptual significance was considerable. By the end of the Unity period, Enclave engineers no longer regarded mechanical power as something necessarily tied to geography. If heat could be converted efficiently into motion, a workshop theoretically no longer required a suitable river, nor a mine a convenient waterfall.

Contemporary observers did not yet foresee the full implications. Steam pumps remained rare experimental machines, and wind and water continued to provide nearly all nonliving mechanical power. The research nevertheless represented the beginning of a technological transition potentially more consequential than gunpowder.

The Legacy of Unity

Thirty years after the fall of the Red City, the Enclave had become a fundamentally different political entity from the state that had entered the Triple Alliance War. Its unity did not rest primarily upon common ancestry, nor entirely upon shared religion. The descendants of Wesley's followers constituted only one population among many, and Providential belief existed alongside local religious traditions in several regions. What increasingly held the state together was participation in a common administrative, economic, educational, and legal structure.

The process remained incomplete. Scimitar raiders continued to threaten southern commerce, anti-Enclave sentiment survived in parts of the Granitefist mountains, Red political identity had not disappeared, and some communities regarded civic integration as cultural absorption under another name. The Merchant Rising demonstrated that economic reform could generate organized resistance even among populations that benefited from political stability, while the Great Flux revealed that greater connectivity created dangers as well as prosperity.

The period nevertheless represented the longest sustained peace experienced by most of the region in generations. Population recovered from wartime losses, trade expanded, roads and waterways became safer, literacy increased, and medical institutions spread into territories where formal health care had previously been rare. The Great Flux, despite its enormous human cost, accelerated the development of a scientific understanding of disease and strengthened the relationship between research and public administration.

Most importantly, the problem that had defined Wesley's age had changed. The early Enclave had pursued knowledge because isolation protected it from a violent outside world. The postwar Enclave increasingly possessed the power to shape that world itself. Its universities, foundries, hospitals, shipyards, councils, markets, and armies operated across territories whose populations had once known one another primarily through war or tribute.

The next stage of expansion would therefore not be driven principally by the need to survive neighboring powers. With the continental balance largely secured and the eastern shipyards producing increasingly capable vessels, Enclave planners began to look beyond the known political world toward coastlines and peoples that had played little part in the wars of the previous century.

For the first time since the Sequester, the principal frontier of the Rise of Reason no longer lay beyond a mountain pass.

It lay beyond the sea.

Finished “In Tempest's Wake” by Dayton Ward.

Following the Battle of Vanguard between Starfleet and the Tholians, Enterprise, Endeavor, and Sagittarius undergo repairs, while Nogura debriefs Kirk on his involvement in the events leading up to the final battle, and the battle itself.

It's brief, but seems largely unnecessary, as it reads a lot like deleted scenes from the previous novel, held together with a frame plot. We get a little bit more context around how much Kirk and his crew knew about Vanguard. But there's not much we the audience didn't already know.

There's some interpersonal exchange between Kirk and Nogura. Nogura will go on to be Starfleet CnC during the events of “The Motion Picture”, though he'll be mentioned in dialog only, with a few appearances in beta cannon that I suppose I'll get to later. In and of itself, that much is fine. But still doesn't really give any new information.

According to the acknowledgements, Pocketbooks requested this coda. I'm not sure what they felt was missing, except maybe some continuity housekeeping, which often feels tacky to me. And for a novel series centering around covert operations, I think those expectations had already been established. It's not like Discovery, with all the “oh, half the viewership are bitching about continuity, so let's burry the whole thing a thousand years into the future and make it all classified” bullshit. It was already classified. So why do we have to classify it again? Just to make it double super-duper classified? But the author said he had fun writing it, and it's a pretty good recap of the final events of the series.

Anyway, it was fine. I guess you could call it “if novels could have DVD Extras”

#StarTrek #StarTrekVanguard

I just read this

The London Magazine (est. 1732) is now accepting pitches for essays, reviews and interviews on an ongoing basis.

The lines are published on the web pages of the Irish Writer's Centre in Dublin. I was browsing, thinking that after more than thirty years I should join. But yes, on an ongoing basis caused this essayist a bit of a twitch. “Ongoing basis” is not merely verbose; it is bureaucratic. It belongs to grant applications, university notices and corporate communications. It's the language of systems talking about processes, rather than people talking about actions. Literary organizations ought to have a more literary ear.

BASYS I recall was a newsroom computer system used by the BBC, ITN, CNN and many other broadcasters from the 1980s onwards. Journalists wrote scripts, managed running orders, exchanged messages, and searched news copy through BASYS terminals long before web-based newsroom systems became common.

BASYS itself became almost invisible because journalists thought of it less as software and more as the newsroom. If someone said “it's on BASYS,” they meant the story, script, contact, or running order was in the system. In the days of the old BBC style often favoured short, concrete wording:

The London Magazine accepts pitches year-round.

A BASYS-trained sub-editor would have deleted “on an ongoing basis” without a second thought.

So, depending on the nuance, they could have written:

is accepting pitches accepts pitches year-round welcomes pitches at any time welcomes submissions throughout the year is open to pitches year-round invites pitches continuously considers pitches throughout the year reviews pitches as they are received has no fixed submission window accepts pitches year-round rather than during specific reading periods is currently open to essay, review and interview pitches accepts pitches without a submission deadline welcomes unsolicited pitches at any time

Or you could simply remove the phrase altogether:

The London Magazine (est. 1732) is accepting pitches for essays, reviews and interviews.

Most readers will assume that if a magazine announces a call for pitches without giving a deadline, submissions are currently open.

The London Magazine welcomes pitches for essays, reviews and interviews throughout the year.

or

The London Magazine is open to pitches for essays, reviews and interviews year-round.

All three say exactly what “on an ongoing basis” means, but sound as if a human being wrote them.

An original note from my Moleskine

It reads like the language of opportunity listings and funding notices. The same institutional voice appears everywhere because organisations increasingly borrow wording from one another. The result is a kind of administrative dialect in which phrases propagate regardless of whether anyone would naturally say them aloud.

An essayist notices such things because essayistic attention begins with a tiny disturbance. Most readers glide over “on an ongoing basis”. The essayist stops. The phrase irritates. It doesn't quite fit the declared purpose of the sentence. And from that small friction emerges a question about how institutions speak, how language becomes automated, and how a phrase once introduced for caution eventually becomes a verbal weed.

The irony is that the announcement concerns pitches for essays, a form whose history is bound up with individual voice. Yet the sentence advertising that opportunity arrives wrapped in language that no identifiable individual would ever use in conversation.

A BASYS-trained sub-editor would have struck it out. Not because it breaks a rule, but because it fails a simpler test: What extra meaning do those three words contribute? The answer is: almost none. And good editing begins when someone notices that.

At the forge And lonely to us now Pay for here And Scotland code This I am A lover unto you At distance might And in dispense of never The hearts of men Witnesses implore To help us her At better best deliver Knowing then To just escape The right and unrely When Heavens move We will know the West And win the work Ahead for all In Canada, we pray The Justice then Our here.

I am a team player.

I began a journey several years ago as a collaborative-type musician. I love all the instruments, only play a few. I love hearing people play on tunes Keri and I have written. I love listening to indie musicians and getting their sounds in my head, then asking them to join where I hear them. I love the camaraderie. I love working on songs as a group. I love correspondence. So it made sense for me to pick this route. What I am learning today has to do with all that.

If they like you, they probably won’t critique you, which is a shame.

As a bipolar person, I have an impulsive streak. Maybe not a streak, to be honest. Maybe I have a gaping chasm of impulsivity that governs at least half of my behavior. Thinking years down the road is not my strong suit. But I am getting better. I try. I feel bad about hastily removing or taking down videos and songs. Some had collaborators who could have possibly given their friends and family those links. I was wrong to go about leaving socials the way I did. I was wrong to take some things down. I am trying to correct as much as possible with quality ingredients, but most of the musicians I have worked with do not speak to me anymore. They used to be friendly. I have to guess why that is. They won’t tell me. Perhaps if we were strangers, I’d get an earful of why I piss them off that I could use in choosing future behavior. I just have to guess. Friends don’t do that anymore. I lose out on that, as a mental patient. Friends have historically helped me with honest talks. Aside from Keri, this rarely ever happens anymore, despite having “friends.”

Learning can be painful, for everyone.

As I am still making lots of music, still collaborating, I am trying my best to make plans for the music and assets to be somewhere for a long time, and that’s specifically for collaborators. They deserve that for helping. I am very sorry I never thought of this until recently, if you have collaborated with me. I guess I haven’t thought about numbers, or anyone else liking the songs, or how convenient it might be for you to share a link of a song you’re on, or how nice it is when the art looks nice for you to share with a non-muso. I am learning still, that much never changes, I hope. The downside is sometimes folks get hurt. I don’t want to hurt anyone, ever, not even MAGAs. But if I am not thinking of them, and taking actions, someone is bound to get stomped on. It isn’t aimed at anyone, I even do it to myself.

What about a book on a psychiatric disorder? Pick a disorder, doesn’t have to be mine. Maybe you know someone with a different one.

I wish everyone could read “Bipolar Disorder for Dummies” or something, but seeing as I am a small percentage of the population, allegedly, no one has time for it except Keri. I’ve tried to get family to read it so they could learn how much of me is in that book, how much of me is mental illness, but no one has except Keri, that I know of. The rest of the family besides Dad hasn’t spoken to me in years. Not even my kids, sister, no one. I wonder if we’d still talk if they had read it, I don’t think I’ll ever know. One of those tough pills for me.

I don’t expect forgiveness, I don’t expect a loaded inbox. I just want to do what is right.

I do not expect grace from anyone. I don’t think expecting grace is graceful, one of my many religious issues. But I find it applies with people too. I think I would get a little more if everyone read that book. But I would never expect them to.

A Promise:

I vow from here on out to take care of collaborators, even years after release. I also promise to get older material looking sharp and posted nicely somewhere so collaborators can click on their handy-work. They have earned that much. Even if we no longer speak, they already have that in the bank. This is how it’ll be, sera.

For the future:

When you think about a collaboration, you may not be thinking a year or five down the road. I urge you to consider that in your initial plans. It is always nice when they come back for round 2. If they can’t find their stuff online, they might not bother.

Kelly Kintner

Editor, Producer

YouTube (this is pretty new, trying to make it nice)

(23 people on this one CD.)

J just left, we worked out and then tried to cover this song by beebadobie and Laufey, and hoo boy. I will say I am proud we covered the whole thing, even if parts of it I’m not happy with. I am still proud because perfect becomes the enemy of good. We also are waking up early as fuck tomorrow to go to LA with friends and we are cooked. She said this would have been a perfect day to sleepover, and I’m glad to be in this position in life.

25 September 2026

Spending so much time alone with Yenah's grandmother's house while working. Each day I've been getting up early, having my morning coffee, and sitting down to work at the kitchen table. As the sun rises, the tall white curtain spanning the length of the living room window starts to glow; one half of the curtain is reinforced by another pink one, so the diffused light that floods into the living room is half pink and half white. It bounces off of the orange wood floor, which creates a warm, saturated, matte environment in which highlights and edges are dulled—a dreamlike effect.

Only two small horizontally-sliding screened windows open to outside air, and green tree leaves cross in front of the view out of both, so the feeling is one of light in abundance outside surrounding the house. Plants seem to grow well on the windowsills too.

My days here have been spent mostly in silence, but it's a busy silence. Just down the street is an elementary school, and I hear the rhythmic phases of its days—pale yellow buses snorting to a stop to delivery sleepy children in the morning, high-pitched voices (some screams) as lunch hour arrives mid-day, and the frenzy of happy squeals and teachers saying goodbye (“안녕히 가세요”) as school is let out for the day in the later afternoon. Some school bells intermittently throughout the day as well, and some days there is singing—groups of children singing.

Another thing about the mornings: magpies like to visit in the morning, and a handful of times I've pulled back the living room curtain to see them jockey for position on a persimmon tree. They're pretty brutal, hip-checking each other off of branches. On days where I do laundry, the laundry machine sounds like alternating white noise waterfall sounds and MRI-machine-like hollow knocks. Mosquitos are frequent visitors at this time of year, so once or twice a day I'll also hear their sharp whines buzz by my ear (I've killed probably upwards of thirty of them in the last month).

The water here is so, so soft, especially compared to London, and the sinks (one in the bathroom and one in the kitchen) rush when turned on with a dutiful urgency that sounds like a mother shushing her baby. Similar to the stream a few blocks away from the house that runs all the way to the Han River.

¿ ⓒNOABC

The NOABC code works because of the 'ABC' code in the English language – this is purposeful code that has been installed into the {specifically} English language – it functions like the 'NATO' phonetic code -

NO =

{N} NOT / no {O} On / over

and is universal for 'not consent' this is how 'ABC' functions so there is a lot of usage for the word 'no' thus it is a powerful code delineator.

'ABC' IS the name of the code and the first three letter A B C – explain the code so this is also a good {and partially known} code – thus NOABC is a good code to not consent to the code 'ABC' in English.

---

¿

USE THIS CODE FOR ONLINE TRANSACTIONS

{add it to 'seller notes' } {if they disagree then they will refund you and not send the item}

¿ NOABC & NOABC# code means we do not consent to code in the language or alphanumeric aspect {including item, card and model numbers} code applies to ALL aspects of this transaction {including packaging & colors} example if there is 'Blue' on an item or package then NOABC applies to the name of the relevant color. We disagree with all user terms & privacy policies individual transaction is not subject to these terms or conditions. THANKS FOR YOUR ATTENTION ON THIS MATTER sending item=agreement.

#shorts

You do things differently. You don't want to go out. In fact, you are naked right now because you can't stand wearing clothes. You don't talk much, but your thoughts are loud. That's because you are always thinking about porn.

You are not really a home nudist. You just see naked people on your screen all day, so you have to be just like them.

You oversexualize your thoughts. Completely.
Rewired.

There is no fixing this.

In fact you get horny knowing there is no return.

So now you just touch yourself. You want to manifest permanent addiction to pornography.

The best way to do this?

EDGE.

That's right. Gooning is more than just masturbating. You want to be locked in this aroused state for hours on end, daily and constantly.

It's all you think about.

It's all you do.

Gooning is you.

Weekends are for... GOONING.

Robert Greene est l’un de mes auteurs préférés. Il a écrit récemment le livre “Sublime“, qui est selon lui, un livre sur ce qui ne peut pas être retranscris.

Sacré challenge.

Mais l’idée qu’il a partagée et qui m’intéresse ici est le fait que nous sommes entourés de symboles. Tout est symbole. Notre monde est perçu la plupart du temps via le prisme du langage.

Il suffit de regarder comment chaque culture, chaque langue appréhende le monde. J’ai en tête ces esquimaux qui ont des dizaines de mots pour désigner les nuances de blanc (ou quelque chose dans ce style là).

Il y a donc une sorte de “grille” ou de “barrière“ entre notre perception et le monde.

Cela fait écho à une citation de Paul Auster qui m’a particulièrement interpelé : “Le langage n’est pas la vérité. Il est notre manière d’exister dans l'‘univers“.

En y pensant, n’est-ce pas terrifiant ? Ou peut-être sublime ? Chacun définit le monde avec ses perceptions, son langage, ses références, son univers.

Chaque échange, chaque partage, chaque mot peut être perçu de mille manières différentes. Une partie se perd dans notre incapacité à saisir ce que Robert Greene appelle le “Sublime“.

Quelle belle idée ! Et quel auteur !

Democracy And Peace

The innocence to relight Nights to foment This dirigible in pen Saving the idea What scarce is night And setting treble then To heights be near you Landing steady For goals within you The nicing days we know Error at keep But what does us deliver But the War we know In amend, the carousel Proper know in gain And timely good The nested and alight To currency enable What right to become In early September Staging for rehearsal Evident as write The springboard does renew And in our time- The way we town and prosper Forgiving gently To those alight And in this day and each Supposing try Penitence renew And in one prayer, a know A silence to the knees And fairing that An earthly father One to one bequeath Finding trust anew For every can And gold For rights entail To love the other A timely mend Supposing to dismiss But then to caution Within our destiny Democracy renew The nights are so and plain And in this way to fold The first unto a year A double Or fighting storm and gale In each decision proud And newly to amend Choice will be our near War can wait Sending dust to here And in this town, we answer What might will guide away But get us then Done right our options near And hibernating poem Decisions mash To fortnights and assume The way of peaceful rest And righting rain Decisions keep- for our best In living and decease Keep our nearness by And thought remen With History in our code Striking then Missiles can afford Our trap is War And in this known to mend Life will be to then Peace at need And giving decisions by To then in Spring Useful order As sharp and in the sky What metal here- as we need Selection cross to know And coded hand deliver What Victory will might And there in Him Better decisions by And baskets to be then Collected near- Within us And candle light appears Brought us to the known What missions ark And to the muster free What ailing dawn But within our eyes The given light- Handing hardly by To rights delay Here within is known To office and to keep For peace reward Maybe Heaven through And blowing on one candle As History hurts The saving due And lights in might deliver Fortunes known And verses keep To right of peace we own Forever there In gilded might Keeping us suppose The full and spare What History will collect For sorry distance then The right of time And in our World, the decent Stay with me Our March is often And distance might You will find me there In peace as known Only History is our War And might amend This blossom here A place to lay our own Night will be anew Rome is home And prophecy collect Within to rest Be here with me In silence and in weary If so, I own- ligatures and often Beside me A prayer into the night- As known And here ediction This grace is to collect What timely new Our verses free Such Victory in The Lord!

Somewhere in a comment thread under an image of a very thin young woman, a 12-year-old girl is asking for the workout routine. Nobody will answer her truthfully, because no routine exists. The woman in the picture never trained. She never ate, never slept, never stood in front of a mirror. She was generated.

That scene is not an invention for the purposes of this article. It is a pattern that Mia Perumal, a 19-year-old student at Cardiff University who has recovered from an eating disorder, described to the BBC in a report published on 4 October 2026. Over the past year, she said, she has watched very thin AI-generated people multiply across her social media feeds, and she has seen comments from girls as young as 12 asking how to get the body on screen. “It's all very well saying 'oh, it's AI, it's not real',” she told the BBC. “But eating disorders don't really listen to rationality.”

The same report carried a warning from Phillippa Diedrichs, professor of psychology at the Centre for Appearance Research at the University of the West of England in Bristol, whose research spans body image, eating disorder prevention and advertising. Generative systems, she explained, tend to fall back on narrowly defined traditional beauty standards unless someone deliberately prompts them to do otherwise. The result is that people of colour, and people with distinctive features, quietly disappear from the pool of images that young people measure themselves against. “If we're comparing ourselves to a very narrow beauty standard,” she said, “... that inevitably means that many of us are not going to meet those beauty ideals.”

Put those two observations side by side and a set of uncomfortable questions emerges. What happens to the way young people see their own bodies when the bodies they are invited to compare themselves with are not merely idealised, but invented? Does knowing that an image is synthetic offer any protection at all? And if the default image produced by these systems is a choice rather than a law of nature, what would happen if the industry decided to change it on purpose?

The research, some decades old and some published only this year, gives surprisingly clear answers. They are not reassuring.

Fashion Has Already Hired Models Who Do Not Exist

The BBC's warning landed in an industry that has been edging towards synthetic people for some time. In the August 2025 issue of American Vogue, an advertisement for Guess featured a flawless blonde model in a striped maxi dress and a floral playsuit. She had been created by Seraphinne Vallora, a London-based AI marketing agency founded by Valentina Gonzalez and Andreea Petrescu. A small line of text at the edge of the page disclosed that the model was AI-generated. It was the first time a synthetic person had appeared in the magazine, and the backlash was immediate.

Vanessa Longley, chief executive of the UK eating disorder charity Beat, told the BBC at the time that the development was worrying, warning that exposure to unrealistic bodies can damage self-esteem and that poor body image increases the risk of developing an eating disorder.

Guess was not alone. In March 2025, H&M announced it would create AI “digital twins” of 30 real models, working with the models and their agencies, and a campaign using those twins followed in the summer. The BBC's October report listed Balmain and Levi's among the brands that have experimented with AI models. The commercial logic is obvious: a synthetic model never ages, never gets ill and never needs a flight.

What the commercial logic leaves out is the person looking at the result. As Hannah Marriott, a lecturer in marketing and strategy at Cardiff Business School, argued in a piece for The Conversation in August 2026, consumers have long been able to recognise that a photograph has been heavily edited while still believing that a human being exists behind it. Synthetic models sever that link. “Authenticity may depend less on what a model looks like,” she wrote, “and more on whether consumers perceive them as genuinely human.”

Adult consumers, it seems, can be put off by synthetic models when they know what they are looking at. The question is whether that conscious scepticism reaches the part of the mind where body image actually lives.

Why the Mind Compares Itself With Strangers

In 1954 the American social psychologist Leon Festinger published “A Theory of Social Comparison Processes” in the journal Human Relations. His central proposal has proved remarkably durable: when there is no objective yardstick available, people evaluate themselves by comparing with others. Festinger also argued that people prefer to compare themselves with others who are reasonably similar. A novice chess player does not measure herself against a grandmaster.

Seventy years of body image research have complicated that last point. Appearance is a domain with no objective yardstick at all, and people compare themselves constantly with others who are not remotely similar: models, actors, athletes, influencers. Upward comparison with people judged more attractive is consistently associated with worse mood and greater body dissatisfaction. This is the engine behind what researchers call the thin ideal and, more recently, the fit ideal: the culturally specific picture of a desirable body that people absorb, or internalise, from the images around them.

Social media made that engine run faster by collapsing the distance between celebrity and peer. An influencer appears in the same feed as school friends and replies to comments. Festinger's similarity principle has been exploited rather than overturned. Synthetic influencers take this one step further: they are designed to look like people who might plausibly be in your feed, with gym selfies, beach shots and outfit posts. The 12-year-old asking for a workout routine is not making a mistake about genre. She has correctly read the visual cues that tell her this is a peer-like body, attainable through effort, and she has responded exactly as social comparison theory predicts. The problem is that the cues are false. The body was never attained through effort, because it was never attained at all.

There is a further twist. Even the most heavily retouched photograph of a real model began with a real body, constrained by anatomy. A retoucher could narrow a waist or lengthen a leg, but there was a skeleton underneath and a person who could, at least in principle, be met. A generated body has no such constraint. The comparison target is not merely an exaggerated human. It is a statistical composite presented as an individual.

What the Machines Learnt About Beauty

If generative systems produced a genuinely random spread of body types, the risk might be diluted. They do not. A steady accumulation of audits since 2023 shows that, left to their own devices, image generators reproduce and frequently amplify the narrowest version of conventional attractiveness.

In June 2023, Bloomberg published an analysis by Leonardo Nicoletti and Dina Bass of more than 5,000 images produced by Stable Diffusion. Under the headline “Humans Are Biased. Generative AI Is Even Worse”, it reported that the model took racial and gender disparities to extremes worse than those found in the real world.

A year later, in June 2024, The Washington Post asked three of the leading tools, Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion, to generate pictures of a “beautiful woman”. Every single image depicted a thin woman. Just 2 per cent showed visible signs of ageing, and only 9 per cent showed women with dark skin tones. Diedrichs's warning about who gets left out is not a hypothesis. It has been measured.

The pattern holds when researchers look specifically at bodies. In a study published in Psychology of Popular Media and announced by the University of Toronto in November 2025, Delaney Thibodeau, a postdoctoral researcher in the Faculty of Kinesiology and Physical Education, and colleagues including Professor Catherine Sabiston systematically coded 300 images generated by Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. AI-generated women were overwhelmingly thin and AI-generated men hyper-muscular. Images of athletes were far more likely to show very low body fat and highly defined muscularity. Ninety per cent of images of an unspecified “athlete” showed a male body. Racial and age diversity was minimal, and not a single image showed a visible disability.

A preprint released in April 2026 by Justin Thomas and colleagues, titled “Underweight and Overrepresented”, went further. The researchers generated images of women in various occupations using prompts that said nothing about body size, then asked 129 American women to rate the figures' body size. The proportion of images perceived as underweight was more than three times the expected rate of underweight among American women. Women in higher-prestige occupations were more likely to be rated underweight. The study has not yet completed peer review, but its direction matches the wider literature.

A Fordham University study presented at a 2025 computational linguistics conference found the mirror image: DALL-E 3 tended to depict words such as “greedy” or “immoral” as heavier people. And in 2023 the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that image generators produced pictures glorifying unrealistic bodies in response to 32 per cent of prompts drawn from eating disorder forums.

None of this is mysterious. Generative systems are trained on vast collections of internet images saturated with advertising, fashion and stock photography, the very images body image researchers have spent decades criticising. They learn the historical bias of that visual culture and output its statistical centre with perfect lighting. Diedrichs's point about defaults is precisely this. The narrow ideal is not something the system has to be told to produce. It is what comes out when nobody tells it anything.

A Decade of Labels That Did Not Work

The intuitive response, and the one Mia Perumal says people keep offering her, is disclosure: tell young people the bodies are fake. Body image researchers have been testing that intuition for well over a decade with retouched photography, and the results are consistently discouraging.

In 2013, Marika Tiggemann and colleagues at Flinders University in Adelaide published a pair of experiments in the journal Body Image. Female undergraduates viewed fashion advertisements with no label, a generic warning that the image had been digitally altered, or a more specific warning. The labels produced no benefit. Worse, for women who habitually compared their appearance with others, the specific warning labels were associated with increased body dissatisfaction.

In 2018, Jasmine Fardouly and Elise Holland tested the social media version of the idea. They showed 164 young American women idealised Instagram images with or without disclaimer comments. Viewing the idealised images harmed body image regardless of the disclaimer. The only measurable effect of the disclaimers was that women formed a less positive impression of the person who posted them.

By 2020 there was enough evidence for a systematic review. Sarah McComb and Jennifer Mills of York University in Toronto examined 15 experimental studies on media disclaimers, publishing their findings in Body Image. Eleven found disclaimers ineffective at reducing body dissatisfaction after exposure to thin-ideal images. Three found medium-sized benefits. One found that disclaimers made things worse. Particularly troubling, specific and warning-style disclaimers appeared harmful for women who were already highly dissatisfied with their bodies, and in one case women with restrictive eating habits who saw a warning label went on to eat fewer calories than those who saw the same image without one.

A warning that draws attention to a body can increase the attention paid to it. For someone already vulnerable, a label saying “this waist has been altered” may simply confirm that the waist is the thing worth looking at.

Telling People It Is AI Changes Trust, Not Feelings

Perhaps AI is different. A label saying a body has been slimmed still implies a real body underneath; a label saying the whole person is synthetic seems more decisive. This year researchers began testing that directly, and the early answer is no.

In February 2026, the International Journal of Eating Disorders published a study by Brooke Bennett and colleagues at Clemson University in South Carolina. They recruited 296 women who were regular social media users and randomly assigned them to one of two groups. Both viewed ten AI-generated Instagram images of female content creators; only one was told they were AI-generated.

Both groups reported significantly lower body satisfaction after viewing the images. Knowing that the images were AI-generated made no significant difference to that decline. What disclosure did change was trust: the informed group showed a steeper drop in their trust in technology. The authors concluded that viewing AI-generated images of influencers negatively affects body image regardless of whether the role of AI is known, and that labels “may help keep the user informed” but “are not enough”.

A second experiment, published this year in Computers in Human Behavior: Artificial Humans by Jessica Alleva, Tuğba Türkcan, Linda Lin, Chrisa Sloutas and Jasmine Fardouly, reached a similar conclusion. The researchers showed 291 women aged 18 to 31 one of three sets of AI-generated images: bodies conforming to the fit ideal, bodies emphasising functionality and diversity, or neutral objects. Half of each group was told the images were made with generative AI. Women who saw fit-ideal imagery reported lower body appreciation than those in the control condition. Disclosure produced a small increase in one measure, appreciation of what the body can do, but made no difference to body appreciation or appearance satisfaction. And the effects of the imagery, positive and negative, were strongest among women who already tended to compare their appearance or had internalised appearance ideals.

Dove's own large-scale survey work, conducted with Edelman for its 2024 “Real State of Beauty” report across more than 33,000 respondents in 20 countries, found that one in three women felt pressure to alter their appearance because of what they saw online, even when they knew it was fake or AI-generated.

Put together, these findings make Mia Perumal's observation look less like intuition and more like a summary of the evidence.

The Gap Between Knowing and Feeling

Why should conscious knowledge offer so little protection? The research does not settle the mechanism, but the literature suggests several plausible explanations.

The first is that appearance comparison is fast and largely automatic. The comparison happens first, and any correction comes later, if at all. A label is read after the image has already been seen and evaluated.

The second is internalisation. Once a person has absorbed a particular ideal as the standard of what bodies should look like, every image that matches the ideal reinforces it, whether or not that specific image is real. A synthetic body does not need to be believed in to confirm what the viewer already thinks a good body looks like.

The third concerns vulnerability, and it is the most important for the girls Mia Perumal describes. Several of the studies cited here, from Tiggemann's in 2013 to Alleva's in 2026, found the harm concentrated among people who already compared themselves heavily or had already internalised appearance ideals. Those are precisely the people most at risk of developing eating disorders, and adolescence is a period when appearance comparison and body concern often intensify.

The scale of that risk in the UK is not small. NHS England's 2023 follow-up to its Mental Health of Children and Young People survey found that 12.5 per cent of 17 to 19 year olds in England had an eating disorder, up from 0.8 per cent in 2017. Among young women in that age group the figure was 20.8 per cent. Methods differed between survey waves, so the comparison should be treated with caution, but the direction is hard to ignore.

Eating disorders are not simply mistaken beliefs that the right information will correct. They involve compulsions, fears and distorted perceptions that resist argument. Telling someone in the grip of one that the image is not real is a little like telling someone with a phobia that the spider is harmless. The statement is true. It is also beside the point.

Laws Written for the Airbrush

Governments have tried to regulate idealised imagery before, and most interventions have been built on the disclosure model the research now calls into question.

Israel was an early mover. Its so-called “Photoshop law”, passed by the Knesset in March 2012 and in force from 1 January 2013, required fashion and commercial models to have a body mass index of at least 18.5, and required advertisers to disclose when images had been digitally altered to make models look thinner.

France followed. Under a 2016 health law and a decree that took effect on 1 October 2017, commercial photographs in which a model's body shape or silhouette had been altered by image-editing software must carry the words “photographie retouchée”. Breaches carry fines of up to 37,500 euros, or up to 30 per cent of the cost of the advertisement.

Norway went further still. Since 1 July 2022, its Marketing Control Act has required a standardised label on paid advertising, including sponsored influencer posts, in which body shape, size or skin has been altered by retouching or other manipulation, including filters. Its stated aim is to make consumers, particularly children and young people, aware that the people in advertisements deviate from reality.

In the UK, the Conservative MP Luke Evans introduced a Digitally Altered Body Images Bill in September 2020, and again as a Ten Minute Rule Bill in January 2022, proposing a logo for advertisements in which a body's proportions had been digitally altered. Neither version progressed. Instead, the Advertising Standards Authority has acted case by case. In February 2021, following the #filterdrop campaign started by the make-up artist Sasha Pallari, the ASA ruled that two tanning brands' influencer advertisements were misleading because filters exaggerated what their products could do.

All of these interventions share an assumption: that there is a real body somewhere, and that the problem is the gap between that body and its altered image. Synthetic models dissolve that assumption. There is no original body to deviate from. A Norwegian-style label stating that a body has been retouched makes little sense when the whole body has been generated, and the research suggests that changing the wording to “AI-generated” would not make the label work any better.

The newer generation of rules aimed specifically at AI largely inherits the same logic. The EU's AI Act, whose transparency obligations under Article 50 began applying on 2 August 2026, requires providers to mark synthetic images in a machine-readable format and requires deployers to disclose deepfakes, which the Act defines broadly to include content that resembles real or plausible persons. The Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, which entered into force on 27 July 2026, deferred most high-risk obligations but left these transparency rules in place. Its one concession gives providers of generative systems already on the market before 2 August 2026 until 2 December 2026 to comply with the machine-readable marking duty in Article 50(2). Machine-readable marking is aimed at detection tools rather than human eyes, and disclosure is precisely what the research finds wanting.

The UK regulator has been commendably honest about this limitation in a related context. In guidance published on 29 May 2025, the ASA stated that “disclosure alone is very unlikely to mitigate the harm caused by a fundamentally misleading message”. It warned that using an AI-generated image to show the effect of a cosmetic product that does not reflect real-world results is likely to be materially misleading, whatever the label says. Yet the same guidance noted that making clear an influencer is AI-generated “could well help to negate an otherwise misleading impression”. That may hold for whether a consumer has been misled about a product. It is a different question from whether a child's body image has been harmed.

The Online Safety Act 2023 does not fill the gap either. Since 25 July 2025, platforms have been under a legal duty to protect children from “primary priority content”, which includes material that encourages, promotes or gives instructions for an eating disorder. But a polished image of an impossibly thin synthetic fitness influencer does not, on its face, encourage an eating disorder. It simply sits in the feed, looking aspirational, accumulating comments from 12-year-olds.

Defaults Are Decisions

If disclosure is weak, the logic of the evidence points somewhere else: not to warning people about the images, but to changing the images themselves. This is where the third question raised by the BBC report becomes concrete. What would it mean for appearance standards if the industry default were changed by design rather than left to reflect whatever the systems have learnt?

Nothing about the current default is neutral. A generator that produces only thin women when asked for a beautiful one has not discovered a fact about beauty. It has reproduced decades of commercial decisions by advertisers, editors and casting directors, and leaving that output unchanged preserves those decisions at enormous scale.

Changing defaults is not a radical idea in imaging. In September 2017, Getty Images, the world's largest stock photography supplier, told contributors that from 1 October it would no longer accept “any creative content depicting models whose body shapes have been retouched to make them look thinner or larger”. That was a design decision at the level of supply, not a label at the level of the viewer.

A major brand has also tried to intervene at the level of the prompt. In April 2024, marking 20 years of its Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove pledged never to use AI to create or distort images of women in its advertising, and published what it called the Real Beauty Prompt Guidelines: guidance on the language needed to get generative tools such as Midjourney and DALL-E to produce more representative images. Dove's chief marketing officer, Alessandro Manfredi, said the company sought “a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like, not algorithms”. Diedrichs, who has collaborated with the Dove Self-Esteem Project, observed at the launch that it was becoming “increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is real beauty and what is manufactured by AI”.

But prompt guidelines place the burden on the user, exactly the situation Diedrichs described to the BBC: diversity appears only when someone deliberately asks for it.

The Evidence That Different Images Help

Would changing the default actually help? Here the research is more encouraging than it is about labels.

In 2011, Diedrichs and Christina Lee published a study in Psychology and Health with the memorable title “Waif goodbye!”. They showed 171 women and 120 men advertisements featuring thin models, average-size models or no models. Average-size models were rated as just as effective in the advertisements as thin models. And for women who had internalised cultural beauty ideals to an average or high degree, seeing average-size models was associated with a significantly more positive body image state than seeing thin models or none.

In 2019, Rachel Cohen, Jasmine Fardouly, Toby Newton-John and Amy Slater tested body-positive Instagram content on 195 young women. Brief exposure to body-positive posts improved positive mood, body satisfaction and body appreciation compared with thin-ideal or neutral posts. There was a caveat: both thin-ideal and body-positive posts increased self-objectification, the tendency to view one's own body from an observer's perspective, relative to content that did not feature bodies at all.

And the 2026 study by Alleva and colleagues tested exactly the variable in question using generated images. AI imagery emphasising body functionality and diversity was associated with better outcomes for body appreciation and appearance satisfaction than fit-ideal imagery, and the benefits, like the harms, were strongest for the most vulnerable women. Generative tools can produce images that help as well as images that hurt. Which they produce by default is a design decision.

What a Designed Default Could and Could Not Do

Imagine that image generator companies decided that when a user asks for a person without specifying a body, the output should reflect the real range of human sizes, ages, skin tones, features and abilities. Developers already tune their systems heavily to block violence, nudity and copyrighted characters. Adjusting the distribution of body types is the same kind of intervention.

The effect on appearance standards could be significant precisely because of the scale involved. Appearance ideals are learnt from the images a culture circulates. If a growing share of those images is generated, whoever controls the default holds unusual influence over what the next generation learns a normal body looks like.

There are real limits, and honest critics have named them. A generator that produces diverse bodies on request can also be used to simulate diversity without hiring anyone. Hannah Marriott makes this point in her analysis of AI fashion models: synthetic people can mimic a range of appearances, but they cannot share the lived experience of navigating the world in a larger body, or facing discrimination because of one's appearance. A brand could generate a plus-size model, collecting the reputational credit while eliminating the actual person.

Nor would changing generator defaults solve the problem Mia Perumal describes. The thin bodies in her feed are posted by accounts that choose what to publish. A diverse default does nothing to stop a user who deliberately prompts for an extreme body. That is where recommendation algorithms and the enforcement of existing safety duties have to do the work labels cannot.

Who Gets to Decide What a Normal Body Looks Like

There is currently no regulation in the UK, the EU or the United States requiring that the default human body produced by a generative system bear any relationship to real human bodies. The decisions are being taken inside a small number of companies, under commercial pressure to produce images that users find appealing.

One argument holds that any mandated default would itself encode someone's values. But a default always encodes someone's values. The current one encodes the values of the advertising archive. Choosing not to change it is not neutrality. It is a vote for the status quo, cast on behalf of every user who never thinks to ask.

A more modest proposal would treat body representation in generative systems the way some regulators already treat other forms of measurable bias: require developers to audit the distribution of body types their systems produce by default, publish the results, and explain any significant departure from population reality. That would not force any particular aesthetic on anyone. It would simply make the default visible, and therefore contestable. The Washington Post ran such an audit using dozens of prompts.

Advertisers could go further on their own. Rather than a small disclaimer in the corner of a Vogue page, a brand could decline to generate bodies no human being could have, much as Getty did for retouching in 2017 and Israel attempted with its minimum BMI rule for real models. If a body would be unhealthy or impossible in a real person, it should not be used to sell clothes to teenagers.

The Workout Routine for a Body That Was Never Born

Go back to the 12-year-old in the comments. She is not confused about what she wants. She wants to look like the person in the picture, and she has been offered a clear visual promise that this is achievable through diet and exercise. Even if someone told her the body was generated, the evidence suggests it would make little difference to how she felt about her own.

Decades of body image research now extend into the age of generative AI with their conclusions intact. Idealised images harm body image, particularly for the young and vulnerable. Labels do little to prevent that, and telling viewers a body is synthetic reduces their trust in technology but not the damage to how they see themselves. Meanwhile the systems producing these images default, by measurement, to bodies thinner, younger, lighter-skinned and less varied than the real population.

The same research offers a way forward that does not depend on a child reading the small print. Images of varied bodies, real or generated, appear to help rather than harm, and in experiments they were rated just as effective in advertising. The default is a setting, chosen by people, and it can be chosen differently.

Mia Perumal is right that eating disorders do not listen to rationality. That is exactly why the responsibility cannot rest with the people looking at the images. It has to rest with the people deciding what the images look like before anyone sees them.

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References and Sources

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23. Getty Images retouching policy, effective 1 October 2017. PetaPixel, “Getty Images Bans Photos Containing Photoshopped Weight”, 26 September 2017: https://petapixel.com/2017/09/26/getty-images-bans-photos-containing-photoshopped-weight/ ; Engadget, 27 September 2017: https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/27/getty-bans-photoshop-images-models-thinner/
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25. Cohen, Rachel, Jasmine Fardouly, Toby Newton-John and Amy Slater. “#BoPo on Instagram: An experimental investigation of the effects of viewing body positive content on young women's mood and body image.” New Media and Society 21, no. 7 (2019): 1546 to 1564. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444819826530

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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