In post 1097, mastina wrote:I know that saying this secures me as the elimination because if I were the one READING it, I'd call it scum AtE, especially since it is a very un-mastina-like thing to do. (And yes, that saying this, literally all of it, doesn’t make it any less scum.)
But to be honest.
Right now I'm not feeling like pretending to be mastina.
Or rather, I don’t want to feel boxed in to pretending to be what I know mastina is. I don’t have the time I wanted to talk about this, but I had a thought of,
"Why do I even bother."
I had the urge to post that, but a voice told me, "hey, that's not a thought that mastina should have, don't display it publicly".
And it's not!
It doesn't fit my style as either alignment. I don’t post that way as scum, I don't post that way as town, it's a very foreign concept to the mastina persona.
But I don’t feel like pretending to match the mastina persona right now.
I know that I have been in my towngame the entire time, and to briefly go back into the mastina persona:
Genuinely, if you are town, you NEVER get to EVER say you can read me again, EVER, if you scumread me. This is Genuinely one of my towniest games of all time, and if you can't see that, you don’t fucking know how to read me. And never pretend you can, because this isn’t an unusual game from me. This IS me.
Well, prior to this post, at least. But this single not-mastina post does not erase that my entire play prior to this WAS mastina. So if you thought that my content prior to this post wasn't me as town: NEVER claim that you can read me again. I will quote this post every. Single. Time. And will NOT let you forget.
But slipping back out of mastina mode, I had those thoughts.
"Why do I even try."
"What's the point of trying."
"I don’t know why I bother."
And even,
"I give up."
mastina never gives up. It's literally against her fundamental philosophy.
Scumastina believes in fighting to the bitter end. Even when she's literally confscum, she believes that the game isn’t over until the last scum dies. And if she's the last scum, she might know that she has a 0% chance of winning, but for good sport, she refuses to surrender and makes the town still work for the inevitable victory.
And in multiball, she has extra incentive to fight. If she goes down, her scumteam is pretty much fucked. (Multiball2 is notably an exception to this rule, because I was negative utility there. It was my belief that we couldn't win with me alive, so I needed to die. After setting FL up for success, obv.)
Town mastina is relentless. She is conviction personified. Absolute faith in herself to be right, no matter what. Being proven wrong isn’t a setback. And new evidence doesn't change prior reads, barring extreme circumstances.
She pushes, continuously, hard, with absolute strength and resolve, with the belief that she is right.
Literally every game recently, a song has had some of the lyrics play through my mind, a personification of my mindset:
"And I am VINDICATED. I am selfish, (I'm not wrong), I'm right, I know I'm right, I've been that way all along". (Not the exact lyrics of the song, mind you; my mental paraphrase of it with all alterations is me claiming the song as mine.)
So when I say mastina never gives up, I mean it. She never does. Regardless of her alignment. The thought of giving up is foreign to her.
But I don't feel like putting on the mastina persona right now, because with how much shit I'm going through, I just DO feel like giving up.
I've literally broken every promise I made to myself for mafia games. I've skipped working out, slacked off on work, am typing in a mafia game rather than working on my novel or keeping up to date on the discord servers I frequent. I haven't streamed, done art, played league or tft (I literally missed out on a full week of tft quests, which guarantees I don’t get the T3 emote) or the new Disney Dreamlight event.
My life has been pretty much exclusively games (which shows if you do a site search--when was my last non-game post? When was my last not-ongoing mafia post?), and I am angry. I am tired. I am frustrated. I am exhausted.
The mastina persona is in particular furious, but I don’t have the ability to muster forth the will to type out that rage. (Oh there’s definitely facets who want me to. But I have the steering wheel, not them, so I'm not.)
There is just physical, mental, and especially emotional, fatigue going on.
So I just don’t feel like trying anymore.
I know that it’s not a mastina thing to do, but I want to say it anyway:
Objectively, I know that MathBlade's way of claiming is probably town, that there are signs of him not being scum, and importantly: that scum are among those who say it's SvS, those who weakly say it's TvT without trying to defuse it unless they have a good reason they can't (e.g. Titus is town, with this belief, but swamped), and those on the sidelines, with a few who are also scum taking the most convenient stance for them.
But subjectively, I feel like MB was crumbing my type of role (by the way--not claiming. Fuck that.), not a killing role, and that his claim fits as a modified factional nightkill, and that 90+% of his posting is scum.
Plus, without him, the options for scum are rather slim.
My locktowns are NEVER scum here. PPF, Yume, etc. Are all never scum.
And most of my townreads, I feel quite strongly about.
So like, the scum pool is quite small.
I know that objectively I should listen to objectivity, but I don't have a direction, so I just don’t know what to do and feel like giving up.
