allaboutirony

[allaboutirony]

[allaboutirony]

One of my favorite genres of insane Terminally Online Right Wing posting is *sees a pretty woman* "I am a gay pedophile"

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Boyfriend Power (kareshi ryoku) 

彼氏力 is a Japanese term coined in anime/jdrama that made it into Chinese netslang, and refers to an index which measures a man’s suitability as boyfriend material.

(source: https://m.weibo.cn/profile/6281709308)

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as much as wei wuxian lacks any sense of self preservation and just like the bare minimum level of self worth required to value himself and his own safety/comfort I don't think he actually like. hates himself. at least not in the traditional sense

I often see him characterized in fanon as constantly and very Bluntly being like "oh I'm a bad bad man who doesn't deserve any love or affection" even tho that... doesn't really match his character? like the man obviously has self worth problems and values his life and comfort below literally everybody elses, often to a harmful and deadly degree, and the way he treats and thinks of himself is clearly by no means healthy, but I certainly don't think it manifests in the way people like to depict it where wei wuxian actively has these desperately tragic self depreciating thoughts that literally Spell Out his lack of self worth to himself

he spends So much time and effort really driving home the whole "I'm just an arrogant shameless genius" act and being in complete denial of any negative emotions he has that it would be incredibly out of character for wei wuxian to sit around thinking "oh I'm so terrible and I don't deserve love or kindness because I'm such an awful awful man" much less to Say That Outloud To A Loved One

wei wuxian KNOWS that he's talented. he KNOWS that he's a prodigy and a genius and near unmatched in his skill and, even after his resurrection when he's a little less arrogant and a little more humble, he certainly is not afraid to say as much to other people or to show off. he doesn't doubt his abilities or his charm or his cleverness, it's not even that he doesn't value them, he simply doesn't put Worth to any of it. he doesn't see himself as undeserving of love and kindness and affection, just Less deserving. anything else in the world is more deserving, above him and his desires and his comfort and his safety. he doesn't hate himself, doesn't even dislike himself, he simply doesn't care for himself

even when he accepts harsh punishment too quick and without protest, it's not a form of blatant self hatred or self harm, it's a manifestation of his feelings of not being worth the effort of being spared. it probably even comes from a place of valuing himself "Too Much". because wei wuxian is very talented and very smart and he is the very best at everything he does, so if somebody he places any value or trust in decides to punish him, well, then he really must have done something terrible ("at least I could be killed by you - that would be worth it" and all that) he simply has no affection or tenderness to give himself. that is not synonymous with hatred or even with apathy

wei wuxians lack of self worth does not manifest in self depreciating thoughts or monologues about how nobody can or should love him, because for as much as wei wuxian talks, he is a man of action

wei wuxian does not hate himself, but he will provoke wen chao and accept a beating and a night in a cell with grace if it keeps others safe. everyone else at the wen indoctrination camp remaining unharmed is worth one night of his blood and tears

wei wuxian does not hate himself, but he is so very prepared to let madam yu cut off his hand, so very prepared learn to use a sword with his left, if it will spare yunmeng. everything he loves and wants to protect is worth more than a hand, no matter how unfair that punishment may be

wei wuxian does not hate himself, but he will give jiang cheng his core. because jiang chengs happiness is worth more than everything he has dedicated his life to, everything he has spent countless hours becoming the very best at. to see jiang cheng smile again, to see jiang yanli stop worrying and simply be able to rest again, that is worth far more to him than anything a golden core could offer

wei wuxian does not hate himself, but he will let the world believe he has been cast from his family to spare them. wei wuxian does not hate himself, but he will not tell wen qing he is injured, because his blood is not worth her worry

wei wuxian does not hate himself, but when the wen remnants die for him, when jiang yanli perishes by his hand, however indirect, well. those losses and those crimes are far too heavy and far too abhorrent for his life to be worth anything in the wake of them

and wei wuxian does not hate himself, but he will let the world believe for a second time that he is a liar and a villain and a monster if that will spare even just lan wangjis name. wei wuxians reputation is worth far less to him than lan wangjis

wei wuxian does not hate himself, of course wei wuxian does not hate himself. he loves himself, actually. it's just that wei wuxian does not love himself back, and he certainly loves everybody else far more

[allaboutirony]

(with thanks to @paradife-loft​ for their support and input)

[allaboutirony]

[allaboutirony]

While the source material clearly intends Xue Yang to be read as an orphan (perhaps orphaned so young he has no memory of his parents), I think it’s underexplored in fandom that he never ACTUALLY SAYS that his parents DIED, but rather that he was a child without parents. 

“He had neither dad nor mom nor money” (via the official english translation)

I think there’s something in here worth exploring about the possibility that Xue Yang was abandoned by his parents. 

Perhaps he remembers one or both of them and/or the event, perhaps he does not but just has a sense of it having happened, perhaps he has no memories of it at all but it still psychologically impacted his development. 

Just about every character in the story can be better understood by looking at how they were raised, and Xue Yang is CERTAINLY not an exception. 

There are myriad ways to interpret his childhood (though none of them stable, safe, or cared for), but I have been thinking a LOT lately about how being abandoned by his parents could have shaped him into who he later became.

His behavior in the Villainous Friends extra (wherein he, seemingly arbitrarily, breaks things and antagonizes people and then specifically challenges Jin Guangyao about paying for damages) COULD be interpreted as acting out in a way that’s common for children and teens with a history of abandonment who are testing the waters of just how much their new guardian/s will tolerate. This sort of behavior can be a self fulfilling prophesy as well as an attempt to prove to themselves that their expectations of rejection or punishment are correct.

If Xue Yang has only ever known the world to be a painful place where people reject and abandon him, then that’s how he expects the world to continue behaving. If suddenly someone defies this expectation, it is simultaneously a fascinating and wondrous thing, and also a threat to his worldview. After all, if THIS person can be kind and care for him, then why didn’t anyone else?

If JGY, who at this point is essentially just his handler, can be unconditionally patient with him… then why couldn’t others have been patient with him over much less? And why couldn’t his own parents, who had considerably higher responsibility to him, be as patient as JGY?

It’s much easier to push and push and push until you break the patience and prove your cynicism correct, than it is to grapple with those painful questions. And after all, Jin Guangyao had an exterior force (Jin Guangshan) requiring him to show patience. And once that force was removed, so was Xue Yang. This, perhaps, felt as much like validation as it did betrayal.

There might be a parallel to be made here, too, about how JGY was and felt betrayed/abandoned by his father. This in common might be something that they bonded over.

And of course, as always, there’s Yi City.

Xue Yang expects Xiao Xingchen to abandon him, and his elaborate “revenge” was at least in part in preparation for that anticipated betrayal. He “knows” he will be betrayed and, perhaps unlike what happened with Jin Guangyao, he intends to be ready for it this time. Ready to punish Xiao Xingchen the MOMENT it happens, or ready to convince him not to betray him after all (what is “We’re not so different, I’m not uniquely evil, you’re ending our life together because you think you’re better than me but look! Look! You and I are the same now” if not a deeply misguided and utterly desperate plea?).

At some point he starts hoping it just won’t happen, and stops needing the “revenge” plot. When it starts unraveling before him, he tries for understanding first. What is “Hear my story, THEN decide–” if not begging to be understood?

Of course it doesn’t work.

Xiao Xingchen doesn’t even kill Xue Yang, either; he goes Away. Goes where Xue Yang can’t. If Xue Yang is read as having this particular trigger, Xiao Xingchen’s suicide may feel like abandonment all over again.

Perhaps Xiao Xingchen NOT killing Xue Yang becomes a parallel to Xue Yang’s parents abandoning him to suffer alone instead of keeping him or killing him. Or else maybe Xue Yang’s mother DID try to kill him (drown him or left him out in the cold) and he just managed to survive, in which case Xiao Xingchen NOT trying to kill Xue Yang puts him a cut above even Xue Yang’s own mother/parents.

Final thought:

While I find Xue Yang’s lack of familial connection to the rest of the cast compelling, I also find “what if” scenarios fascinating to explore, and “Xue Yang was abandoned by parents who might still be around during the story” does create some fascinating opportunities for fic.

Such as:

What if Xue Yang was yet another illegitimate son of Jin Guangshan? What if he knew but Jin Guangyao didn’t? What if Jin Guangyao knew but Xue Yang didn’t? What if Jin Guangshan himself knew? That would really put the insistent protections into a very weird light (is there a heart in there? Or did he think he could string Xue Yang along like he did Jin Guangyao? Or was Xue Yang blackmailing him?)

OR

What if Xue Yang was the illegitimate son of Chang Cian? It certainly puts a spin on that entire scenario. Little Xue Yang has another reason to want to please this man, and a further reason to feel betrayed by the abuse. Chang Cian not even recognizing him. Xue Yang taking revenge on the entire family because they ALL wronged him in a way he can’t articulate. Because they got to live the life he could have if he’d been wanted.

Certainly none of this is canon, but it’s not TERRIBLY far beyond the bounds of canon either, and makes for some juicy food for fic.

[allaboutirony]

Guy who has wandered through the halls and corridors of your body not with any special kind of love but with the untold intimacy of a contractor assessing the damages and potentials voice: right, so the main issue here is that the body is currently a temple, okay, and what we want is for it to be a home, cause temples are pretty and all and occasionally nice to be in if you're into that sort of thing but very few people would actually want to live in one. So what we're gonna do first is you're gonna take a look at what's here, the carrying walls and windows and all that, and you're going to come up with something you'd actually like to be alive inside of, and it's going to be a lot of work and it's going to feel strange and stupid and embarrassing but you're still gonna do it, because otherwise this construction site is fucked. And maybe what you want to live in is a skatepark or an anime-themed cat cafe or an esoteric library that has a dildo section for some reason, so it might feel like it's a downgrade from a temple, but it's actually the opposite cause the main customer for a body is you and the main customer for a temple are templegoers and maybe higher powers of some kind, - i wouldn't know about those, they never hired me, - not the temple itself, which is what you are, right, cause the body/mind/soul separation doesn't actually do anything, so what you're gonna do is look at the current layout and dig out whatever hope and ability to want you have and come up with a blueprint, and then my boys can actually get to work. Oh, and you have got to change the windows, it's drafty as fuck in here.

[allaboutirony]

Hey, don’t cry. Free online database of Japanese folk lore

[allaboutirony]

I had a dream last night that Neko Atsume added a new food item called “Shitty Bitz” and buying it gave you fish instead of the other way ‘round but it put it out as soon as you bought it and you couldn’t replace it and it took forever to get emptied out (the only way to get rid of it) because it would only attract two cats and their names were Hobo and Glunkus but also that was the only way to get those two cats to show up.  Hobo looked like a kinda dirty brown cat and Glunkus looked like the devil like he was black and his entire face was teeth.  I woke up crying

[allaboutirony]

Thousands of premature infants were saved from certain death by being part of a Coney Island entertainment sideshow.

At the time premature babies were considered genetically inferior, and were simply left to fend for themselves and ultimately die.

Dr Martin Couney offered desperate parents a pioneering solution that was as expensive as it was experimental - and came up with a very unusual way of covering the costs.

It was Coney Island in the early 1900’s. Beyond the Four-Legged Woman, the sword swallowers, and “Lionel the Lion-Faced Man,” was an entirely different exhibit: rows of tiny, premature human babies living in glass incubators.

The brainchild of this exhibit was Dr. Martin Couney, an enigmatic figure in the history of medicine. Couney created and ran incubator-baby exhibits on the island from 1903 to the early 1940s.

Behind the gaudy facade, premature babies were fighting for their lives, attended by a team of medical professionals.To see them, punters paid 25 cents.The public funding paid for the expensive care, which cost about $15 a day in 1903 (the equivalent of $405 today) per incubator.

Couney was in the lifesaving business, and he took it seriously. The exhibit was immaculate. When new children arrived, dropped off by panicked parents who knew Couney could help them where hospitals could not, they were immediately bathed, rubbed with alcohol and swaddled tight, then “placed in an incubator kept at 96 or so degrees, depending on the patient. Every two hours, those who could suckle were carried upstairs on a tiny elevator and fed by breast by wet nurses who lived in the building. The rest [were fed by] a funneled spoon. The smallest baby Couney handled is reported to have weighed a pound and a half.

His nurses all wore starched white uniforms and the facility was always spotlessly clean.

An early advocate of breast feeding, if he caught his wet nurses smoking or drinking they were sacked on the spot. He even employed a cook to make healthy meals for them.

The incubators themselves were a medical miracle, 40 years ahead of what was being developed in America at that time.

Each incubator was made of steel and glass and stood on legs, about 5ft tall. A water boiler on the outside supplied hot water to a pipe running underneath a bed of mesh, upon which the baby slept.

Race, economic class, and social status were never factors in his decision to treat and Couney never charged the parents for the babies care.The names were always kept anonymous, and in later years the doctor would stage reunions of his “graduates.

According to historian Jeffrey Baker, Couney’s exhibits “offered a standard of technological care not matched in any hospital of the time.”

Throughout his decades of saving babies, Couney understood there were better options. He tried to sell, or even donate, his incubators to hospitals, but they didn’t want them. He even offered all his incubators to the city of New York in 1940, but was turned down.

In a career spanning nearly half a century he claimed to have saved nearly 6,500 babies with a success rate of 85 per cent, according to the Coney Island History

In 1943, Cornell New York Hospital opened the city’s first dedicated premature infant station. As more hospitals began to adopt incubators and his techniques, Couney closed the show at Coney Island. He said his work was done.

Today, one in 10 babies born in the United States is premature, but their chance of survival is vastly improved—thanks to Couney and the carnival babies.

https://nypost.com/2018/07/23/how-fake-docs-carnival-sideshow-brought-baby-incubators-to-main-stage/

Book: The strange case of Dr. Couney

New York Post Photograph: Beth Allen

Original FB post by Liz Watkins Barton

[allaboutirony]

Terry wrote 75% of Good Omens <3 video link <3

[allaboutirony]

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES 2023, dir. Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Dale

[allaboutirony]

hey remember that 7-month, 36-artist game of art telephone i hosted last year? well hold onto your assholes and prepare for:

SEE IT ALL HERE!

there's also no reasonable way of fitting all of the submissions into a single tumblr post without crushing all the detail out of everything to satisfy the 30-image limit per post so i'm gonna have to make a whole chain to feature all the kickass art:

1-3: @bedupolker @psshaw @slabmangrave

4-6: @bruneburg @whip-o-will @thedancingemu

7-9: @odetoscavengers @tickflea @deadlydaemondraws

10-12: @charseraph @biomechanicalmush @ungeziefer

13-15: @barabones @threeleggedart @phanta-friends

16-18: @snejkha @librivore42 @edenartfactory

19-21: @lymphwyrm @palossssssand @gachimushi

22-24: umberfossil justagoldfish @pinkbat5

25-27: @solidagold @nutspider elixer

DON'T REBLOG YET WE'RE NOT EVEN HALFWAY THROUGH!!!

[allaboutirony]

Ohh, so I was looking at my storage and found these! I originally shared them on twitter before yeeting the platform. Anyway, feel free to use! Art memes for your oc :D

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of daydreaming, codependency and non canon compliancy

[allaboutirony]

Remind me later.