maskormenace | 06 ⚜ Text

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06 ⚜ Text | ID: Anonymous

[There's a certain anonymity in text. A certain kind of power.

Invisibility affords safety and security, yet enables the greatest cruelty. It offers the individual the chance to be sucked into the swirling whirlpool; that spiral pathway to the state of consciousness called the group mind. And at the heart of that mind is fear.

Fear is the first and greatest teacher anyone can have, he knows. How people could begin to understand the world without developing their exploration of fear, he had no idea. A child without fear of their parents is a child without an awareness of danger. Parents insure their children against failure by making them terrified of a lack of success - of being worthless in their eyes. The first lesson begins with parents, yes.

He hadn't known his parents. He'd lived with his Granny, who'd taught him to see fear was everything and nothing. It was power and control. It was empty and meaningless.

Mothering Sunday. Father's Day. Parents' Day. Today being what it is, he will help people see the truth. Should they choose to close their eyes, he'll force them open.]

Fear is the greatest enemy; the father and mother of suffering.

You set aside a holiday in which you convince yourselves you love, respect and admire your parents because you fear that you don't care. They grow old, yet you can't wait for them to die.

You give or receive gifts, but none of you are willing to focus on the motivation behind this day. You buy parental approval to avoid being called a failure. You buy cards because you fear voicing questions. You buy into the dream that keeps you an eternal child because you fear the day that comes when you will eclipse their presence.

The religious amongst you fear the Lord; the Father of all. Some of you revere Mary, the Mother of God.

But you are all terrified, frightened children. Scared of the truth. You will never win the approval you crave. You will one day be alone. You will be told you should never have been born. So you celebrate to forget. Except you forget that without a child, both Father's Day and Mother's Day are meaningless. What about the millions of children who have no father or mother?

Why do you lie to yourselves? Why do you celebrate at all?

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I don't do any of that stuff though!

Tell me more.

I'm interested. Why don't you feel any of my statement applies to you?

[Spill your guts on the network. Do it.]

Ugh. I don't get the point of these really nasty posts. It seems like there's always some anonymous arsehole who just wants to make people feel shitty about themselves.

Truth can be a brutal thing.

Do you have trouble answering an honest set of questions?

I have trouble answering a STUPID set of questions. I didn't even know today was any sort of holiday.

Mostly because I was built in a workshop and don't have parents??

I don't think I ever sought approval so much as seeking not to be dismantled for showing independence! And now that that's not a risk I don't have to worry about that either!!! It's pretty neat.

I do find religion kind of interesting in a sociological sense, but I think the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent deity creating and managing a universe shows a lack of evidence in comparison to more conventional scientific theories! The afterlife is a comforting thought in the face of mortality and the search for meaning!

But I think the idea that our lives should have intrinsic meaning is a bit silly! We're all just a collection of variables, really! Kind of like shooting a proton into a particle accelerator to see how things work out! Should every particle have a complex narrative formed around it to justify it's path and destination?? Does every path need to result in a breakthrough, otherwise that particle was a failure???

[ She can go on like this for quite a while ]

[You can't start a post with 'fear' and expect Clark not to guess at least. But he has no proof so he'll simply focus on what the text says.

Which is honestly pissing him off.]

My parents died so I could live. They sacrificed their lives for me and for the good of their planet. so call me a liar all you want, I'm still going to celebrate the love their had for me and the love I have for them at any given occasion.

And as a side note, not all religious people around are Catholic.

Oh. You defend against your ignorance with anger. Fascinating.

But you're not alone. There's quite the multitude here as ignorant as you.

That's ominous, isn't it? I don't think many among us would celebrate a day like today.

Certainly not anyone who liked their parents.

Yes, yes, and America has the separation of church from state. But look around you and ask yourself; are all beliefs, and lack thereof, equally tolerated? Yes? No? Are you sure?

[Let's save that talk about your parents, Superman. Dangle it over your head. It's going to spear through this conversation, but when? That's the question.]

Well. What I find ominous is the unwillingness of people to speak of their subconscious need for revenge and retribution on their parents.

And you reply with a statement that doesn't give one answer or another.

[He's interested, now.]

You liked your parents, then?

So, what is the motivation? Enlighten the people who didn't know it's even a holiday.

[And Crane's verbose enough to follow such conversation, but there's his burning need to discuss fear getting in the way.]

How intriguing.

Perhaps as a machine your collective unconscious is so alien from humanity's that the prevalence of human archetypes and primal fears vary to your own. The instinctive fear of fire, for instance. Or perhaps it's the way our fears piece together that makes our experiences differ. You spoke of dismantlement for independent thought. Humans, too, can have problems with confidence and assertiveness.

But from the way you revealed that's not a risk... The implication is there's nothing left for you to fear?

[Do you want to bet on that?]

My parents are hardworking people, but they've always been proud of me.

I already explained the motivation behind everything in the first instance.

I'm hardly going to repeat myself.

[It's fear. Always fear. Fear is behind everything.]

Well. That certainly isn't the case if they know of your achievements in breaking the land-speed record. I suppose that's why you do it; because mother and father don't pay you any attention. Do you fear being alone?

Did you? Because all I read was some nonsense about fear. I didn't think that mattered, since it's Parent's Day and not Halloween. [It gives him something to think about, though. He doesn't know his real parents, and the memories he does have about his partner's mother... Well, they're not exactly focused on materialism.]

[There's a delay in her response.]

You don't know what you're talking about.

[As someone who was raised by his single mother and grandfather, whose father didn't know he existed until he was sixteen years old and was, by then, well into old age and unable to stay for the wife he'd left back home...this talk of parents and Parents' Day catches Josuke's attention.

Still, there's something that rubs him the wrong way about an anonymous person asking things like this of strangers. It's very intrusive. And it's cruel.]

What about you? What separates YOU from the rest of us?

[ There is no such thing as anonymity. Not when it comes to Crane; Crane's timing. This was his escalation in action. Mother's Day, Father's Day, Parents' Day. Batman had seen as Crane's revelations were splashed about at the event, and known that standing next to such ludicrous information it would be dismissed. But he'd taken away Crane's secrets from it, the things he'd pieced together settling into functional knowledge.

Fear. His favorite subject. His subject ruined. Crane had come too close to it and seen that it could be hollow and now he was fighting to reclaim it in his own terrible way. It had to be soon.

They didn't know what they were talking to, any of them. Well, maybe Oswald, and Superman, but everyone else? They had no idea that even conversing on the topic gave the monster what he wanted.

Most of all he's disgusted by Crane's contempt. His dismissal. The way he treats other people and their love because in his own life love had been a poisoned chalice from which he was hardly allowed to drink--that disgusted him. His own parents had loved him, and he had loved them, and there were no motivations there. Nothing had made his father step between a madman and his wife except for love, and nothing but grief had come of it. Wait for them to die.

Jonathan Crane had clearly been shaken as a baby if he believed any of this was true.

Batman didn't reply. Batman would hunt Crane down and shake him some more. Bruce would reply to this, because depriving Crane of Batman in open philosophical conversation was the only card he had left. ]

Ah, Halloween. Every child's favorite holiday, where they parade as the Devil's minions and unleash Hell on earth if other children's parents don't give them candy. What an original commentary you give.

Nothing cuts deeper than fear. The fear of perfection drives a parent to pressure their child to the point of... well, I'm certain I won't have to spell it out in a letter for you.

[Don't call fear nonsense, you little shit.]

[By contrast, Crane's reply is immediate.]

I believe so. Clearly your streak of independence has been with you since a young age. Did you have to spend much time by yourself? How did it feel to be left alone?

I'm not afraid to say that I fear none of those things. But I can tell that you do. What a miserable life you must have led. Didn't anyone love you?

I'm not ANGRY. I'm just being HONEST. The questions are STUPID, because we're NOT celebrating, are we.

[could u not project like this]

You realize your experience with childhood isn't going to be universal, don't you? Especially somewhere full of people from different universes in the first place.

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06 ⚜ Text | ID: Anonymous

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text; ID reads Superman

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text; look what I found 🎃

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2/2 from Bruce Wayne

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