dartlekey

[dartlekey]

talking with @kchzndrvh and came up with this together! rumi's balcony is covered in a forest of plants, and from one of the artists' visual development sketches, celine's home has a full on garden, so: headcanon that rumi inherited a love of plants and gardening from celine.

rumi's instagram is at least 30% posts of just plants like "I got this handsome boy yesterday! It's a ficus umbellata, native to western Africa. :) #myficus"

they have staff who do the housecleaning but rumi writes out very specific page-long care instructions for each of the plants when they're on tour. she names the plants too.

after every world tour she does an IG livestream of how her plants have been doing since she last saw them 4 months ago, and does a little Q&A, but she tells her mods to only show her the questions about the plants.

it's 80% "boring" leaf-only plants, and some of those things that only flower like once every few years at midnight for 2 hours. one of them is expected to flower only when the group is in Europe and she barely resists rescheduling just bc she's so professional. but she gets bobby to set up a livestream of the plant, and the fans start watching it too... #herkadupul

and then. it flowers for those 2 hours. when they're in the middle of a concert.

after the concert:

and thats all she will ever be able to bring herself to say about it

[dartlekey]

Here's a website where Palestine GoFundMes are vetted and shared that you can send out to people. The url is gazafunds.com

Easy to use and simple. Just share the site whenever someone asks for GFMs for Palestine.

[dartlekey]

“no one’s ever mad at me unless they tell me so” is the best assumption i’ve ever made

[dartlekey]

The Matriarch Isn’t the Villain. She’s the Mirror

I often hear a discourse where Celine in K-pop Demon Hunters, Alma in Encanto and Ming in Turning Red are seen as vilains. They’re the ones who restricted the younger generation, hurt them, and are ultimately responsible for their pain, trauma and self-doubt. They’re framed as the real villains of the story. But I’d like to differ.

These are stories of intergenerational trauma. They are women who survived, repressed, and tried to protect their families the only way they knew how: through control, perfectionism, and emotional suppression.

And yet, when the next generation begins to reclaim joy, freedom, softness — they become the obstacle. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re scarred. Their minds cling to survival strategies, unable to recognize that the environment has changed.

Alma is still stuck fleeing the colonizers.

Ming is still afraid of her true self.

Celine believes that fear and mistakes must be hidden.

It’s not about hating these characters. It’s about how unprocessed trauma twists love into control. How survival, unexamined, turns into rigidity. These women were never given space to process their own pain and they project it onto their daughters and granddaughters.

And here’s something we rarely say enough: intergenerational trauma can create toxic patterns but that doesn’t always mean there was abuse or conscious harm. Even when their love becomes suffocating or controlling, these women are not necessarily “abusive parents.” They are daughters of silence, fear, and sacrifice. And they were never taught another way. It’s important to make that distinction, especially in a world that often pushes a binary, punitive reading of family dynamics.

They’re the product of a generation that was told to endure. But endurance without healing becomes its own kind of violence.

What’s powerful in these stories is that they don’t end in vengeance. They end in confrontation and transformation. The confrontation is necessary: the younger generation refuses the silence. Refuses the shame. Refuses to carry a burden that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The house is destroyed in Encanto.

Mei accepts her full self.

So does Rumi.

And in the best cases, this confrontation allows the elder to soften too. Alma opens up. Ming listens. And I’m hoping in the sequel, Celine will open too.

Maybe that’s also why these stories speak so deeply to POC audiences. These aren’t stories about cutting ties. They’re stories about how hard it is to transform them, to protect ancestral bonds while refusing to perpetuate inherited pain. In many racialized families, collectivity, loyalty, and intergenerational duty are sacred... even when they come at the cost of personal boundaries.

And sometimes, Western individualist frameworks read these tensions as dysfunction or villainy. But for us, they’re just the difficult truth of growing up and trying to do better.

These women aren’t villains. That would be too easy. They embody the fragile, necessary work of bringing change without breaking the thread. These stories are about refusing to inherit their pain without reflection. Because love, without accountability, is not enough.

These stories show us that each generation has something to learn from the next. And the new generation must also break free from the chains they inherited while preserving what is meaningfull.

But it’s not just their story.

One day, we’ll be the older generation.

And we’ll need to be humble enough to learn from the ones after us.

So don’t be a fool.

We may be Mei, Rumi, or Mirabel today.

But tomorrow, we could be Ming, Celine, or Alma.

And when that time comes, we’ll realize how hard it is to unlearn what once kept us safe.

So let’s have compassion for all these characters.

Because these stories show us not just how the cycle of generations works, but how it can make us better, stronger, and more connected... if we’re all willing to go through the change.

∘₊✧──────✧──────✧₊∘

If you’re curious, I’ve written more on K-pop Demon Hunters:

A post on the mental health themes woven through the songs — right here.

A breakdown of Celine-Rumi in comparaison to Gothel–Rapunzel dynamic — here.

An analysis about Rumi, Jinu, and the danger of sinking together — here.

Some book recs for each of the K-pop Demon Hunters characters — here.

[dartlekey]

People are so much more sad, and desparate, and lonely than you think. I have had three incidents in the last four months were a technician I was working with was being either dangerously unfocused (we work with high voltage), or just flat out angry with their coworkers, and every time when I just pulled them aside to say hey, this isn't you, you're nice, and you're competent, so something must be up - what can I do to help - they have responded by bursting into tears. One guy was struggling to get his wife moved into a care home, one guy just got served divorce papers, and the other hadn't slept a wink the night before because his daughter had the pukes.

I haven't spent my whole life responding to people being rude, or stupid, or dangerous with knee jerk compassion. It's a new habit. The first time I did that as the lead for my lab, it was because the guy genuinely was so good natured that I knew something had to be off. But the other two times were just me going, alright, lets see if it always goes this well, and so far, it has. I'm almost 30, and I just figured out that the #1 reason people are shitty are because they are going through shit.

I don't think you have, like, a moral obligation to respond to people being jerks with knee jerk compassion. But it has made my life so much easier the last four months that I would recommend trying. For your own sake. Please.

(I'll step off my soapbox now. Enjoy your Sunday.)

[dartlekey]

Und damit ist die Wahl zum Tumblr Bundestag Sexyman (oder in unserem Fall Sexyfish) vollendet. Wir gratulieren dem Wels vom Brombachsee, sowie der Vizesexywoman Heidi Reichinnek, zu einem wohlverdienten Wahlsieg. 🎉

Eine Trophäe haben wir jetzt nicht direkt vorbereitet, aber Genugtuung ist eh der beste Preis.

@der-wels-vom-brombachsee @heidi-reichinnek-official

[dartlekey]

The other fun thing about shipping Marcille/Falin is that you might think it's going to be toxic because of the Marcille's criminal background or Falin's repressed death wish, but then you read the supplementary material and it turns out the actual vector for potential toxicity is that Marcille has weird hangups about tallman culture's gender expressions that come out in ways that make Falin uncomfortable, and neither of them will ever have the vocabulary to unpack all that because they live in vaguely German Renaissance fantasy land.

[dartlekey]

vintage magazines 🔥

[dartlekey]

oh m-...ahhh...my pockages

[dartlekey]

You guys have GOTTA learn to stop seeking absolution from strangers online.

If someone says "haha Americans are so self-centered they don't know anything about other countries", you don't gotta jump in and explain that actually it's not your fault because you had a bad education. Just learn from the post and move on!

If someone says "white people hate rap because they're racist", you don't gotta jump in and start listing all the totally valid reasons you personally don't like it. You don't have to justify your music taste to strangers, just move on!

If someone says "people should be more involved in their local communities" you don't gotta jump in and start listing all the reasons that you personally can't leave your house and so actually the original post is really ableist. Just accept that the post doesn't apply to you and move on!

Stop publicly demanding that the internet absolve you of sins that some random dipshit made up, it is always going to make you look bad and you'll wind up trapped in an anxious cycle of needing external validation for every aspect of your personality. You don't have to justify yourself to randos on the internet.

[dartlekey]

listen, fuck "to each their own", sometimes your mutual gets into some batshit insane rarepair that they're a little embarrassed about and it becomes your sworn duty to put on your jester bells and jingle jangle proudly by their side for moral support. don't be a pussy. it's ride or die motherfucker

[dartlekey]

[dartlekey]

big whoop, give me 20 minutes on grindr on any college campus in the country and I can do the same thing

[dartlekey]

"But that ship is toxic and problematic" okay ❤️ yay ❤️

[dartlekey]

nice rack fuck i meant cute tits fuck sorry i meant deliciou- no fuck oops i meant fantastic boobs NO sorry im trying to say awooga oops um i mean-