boomcomplains

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You know, I think most of us Garak fans know the name of every episode he is in along with the season and episode number.

However there is one Garak episode that I feel we have all collectively memory-holed because to even bring it up feels like we're giving it power. We barely talk about "Rocks and Shoals" because it hints at the episode that we never bring up.

I just think it's interesting.

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Exactly. My cat Riddles would get bored with it so fast and then you have to figure out where to dispose of it, or just commit to possible radiation poisoning all for like three seconds of mild interest.

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Northsea - Sunderland

Source

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This kinda looks like a scene from Goncharov.

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Source: toffeemuffy

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That moment Rush realizes that even he thinks he is an insufferable shit.

Dr. Rush & Dr. Rush STARGATE UNIVERSE (2009–2011) ⤷ Twin Destinies

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This makes so much more sense than Scott Pilgrim.

An abused person is going to test you on a lot of things before they let you be with them. They need to know you won't hurt them. you won't lie. You won't gaslight. Every single test.

It's a nice fantasy to think someone can pass them all.

Endou Yuu versus the cosmic unknown 

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My best friend was adopted from South Korea. She was told she was an unwanted child born outside of wedlock, so she shouldn't look for her birth mother because it will ruin the woman's life.

She was told she was supposed to be grateful for the family who adopted her. They were such good people.

Good people? Her mother left her without food in an isolated house in the countryside for days. Her mother had multiple boyfriends who, upon finding out they were not the only one, would bang on all the windows and doors screaming for her mom to come out. I was sleeping over during one of these incidents, and my friend was just like "meh, this happens all the time." The memory of the violence men are capable of still haunts me. When I brought it up years later, she had forgotten about it. That's how every day it was.

She told me once that she felt like she was a pet, or a handbag. This documentary used the words supply and demand so much I felt sick. My friend is a human fucking being.

Sometimes, I struggle with how unfair life is, and my friend said to me "Oh, I stopped caring about fairness when I learned as a child I was the only kid in class who couldn't be president." And let me tell you folks, that thought assails me on my darkest of days. I at least thought at one time I could be president, and I didn't know how important that was to self-esteem until she said it.

My friend has been asked if she sees less because of her eyes. I met a Korean once and told them about my friend, and that Korean was offended. "She's not Korean," she said. My friend is treated as someone she's not by East Asians. She worries about her safety as even her own mother votes for Trump. Her mother tells her to be prolife because she would be dead if not for prolife advocates.

My friend was human trafficked. Now, she's holding the pieces of her life, not sure what to do with them. She loves her husband, her child, and her job. She doesn't know who she'd be in Korea because she still remembers that she was told she was a black mark on her birth mother's life.

This documentary is the first time she realized that she was a human, that there is a high likelihood that her documents are made up, that her attempt to reach out to her birth mother was stymied by liars, and that maybe—just maybe—her birth mother actually wanted her. Maybe her birth mother doesn't even know she's alive. I don't know you deal with even one of those things, let alone all of it.

Please open your eyes to adoption. It is not altruistic. It's a way for people to get paid, and for narcissists to look good in their community. By and large, it is not about the child and that is just... so sick.

Adoption is how the government gets out of paying for welfare, and how the wealthy get kids they feel they deserve.

I'm grateful my friend is in my life. She is the most fulfilling relationship I have ever had, but now, I wish that we never met to save her the indescribable sorrow she has had to endure.

My friend is kind. She likes to make gardens in her aquariums. She likes to woodwork things with utility, and she is an amazing cook. She has a son who is a hyperactive ball of both sunshine and thunderstorms, who goes to a school that he is not only welcome at, he never wants to leave. He told her when she picked him up "Come back in a 100 hours" and that means something to her. She's providing what she never had. She likes to go to Hmart because she feels anonymous. She really likes hip-hop. She gets bored easily, and you can watch her eyes drift into her thoughts before she browbeats herself back into paying attention. If you say, I wanna try and make [insert anything] she is not only down for it, she's excited. She is all of this, and so much more.

Growing up, she was told she was angry. That's all her family see her as, even now. But she's not nearly as angry as she should be.

But I guess I just wanted you folks to see her and others like her. What was done to these children is unthinkable, and it still happens even now because we don't see the poor and/or the disadvantaged as people.

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Takarazuka Revue is so funny because it’s like we are a fine upstanding institution of good family values, like homophobia. Please ignore the lesbians making up the majority of people both on stage and in the audience.

Takarazuka Revue is like: we enforce only the strictest gender roles in our troupe as is right and proper, sorting them into the two genders: women who are women, and women who are men. How dare you suggest there’s anything queer about that.

Takarazuka Revue is simultaneously the queerest thing and the least queer thing to ever exist. Takarazuka bucks tradition and is tradition incarnate. Takarazuka is like

and then is like, “no homo”

and maintains itself as one of the most hierarchical artistic organizations in the world with intense control over its performers. This alternate reality where the talented (and lucky, and connected) few can gain the right to openly perform queerness in the one setting comphet capitalism has carved out for them as long as they follow a different even stricter set of rules for dress and behavior. It dissembles traditional gender by its very existence and so must reinforce it at every turn.

And yet despite being the product of a conservative capitalist railroad owner who only really sought to exploit women for entertainment aimed at men (and their hetero families) that remains loyal to those deeply normative puritanical roots, it was and is also one of the most liberating theater and media experiences of queer Japanese people for decades. You can tell from all the queer art about it, by queer people. By the fact that the audience who flocked to it were not (cis) men.

Trying to untangle the mutual influence of shoujo manga to takarazuka is even more difficult that trying to untangle something like the history of modern Broadway and Disney movies. We wouldn’t have The Little Mermaid without Little Shop of Horrors, but we wouldn’t have Wicked without the Disney renaissance, but we wouldn’t have Frozen without Wicked, and going back further to things like Cinderella and Rogers and Hammerstein and they are intertwined but listen to me. Takarazuka and shoujo manga, especially yuri, are more intertwined. And then so much western media has been inspired by shoujo anime. Rose of Versailles the manga was inspired by Takarazuka and then in turn was adapted into their most famous play which then in turn influenced so many more artworks. Uranus and Neptune are an otokoyaku and musumeyaku. Utena and Anthy (and honestly that whole ass show. The stairs?? C’mon). And all the works and creators THOSE works inspired.

We owe so much to Takarazuka but also if we tried to thank them for their role in queer history they’d be like “we’ve never been queer in our lives!!!!!!!!” and then say a slur to your face while taking your money. Incredible. Wish more people knew what the fuck it was and I could get fansubs.

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Unless you're Heinlein, than it's how far away in my lineage does someone have to be so I can (ethically?) fuck them.

it's always "immortals always lose the ones they love!" and never "this family has had this incredible, powerful, loving figure present through generations of their lineage, all because they are descended from someone the immortal loved long ago" and i think that's a shame!!

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And then I was like, it's time to replay Forbidden West.

I love that game so much. Look at all the cultures that exist in spite of and because of what was left behind. How our world and theirs sit in an uncomfortable parallax.

Then realize, this is true outside of the game too.

Look, I know I just tweeted that, but like, I swear I'm in a very good place.