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[star-child-690]

in honour of geto's birthday, i want to talk about the fandom discourse that paints him as a mother. he definitely has a degree in motherology (with a minor in babygirlism), but i also think it’s possible that gege is genuinely using his character to say something interesting about motherhood and maternity.

this post is inspired largely in part by @virgobingo's thoughtful meta on geto and monstrous femininity, which you can find here. i want to extrapolate from the trope of monstrous femininity and extend it to monstrous motherhood. (which @virgobingo also touches on; you should really check out their meta— it's awesome!)

geto's character is immediately established in a protector capacity, which is intensely reminiscent of the tropes that mothers embody in media. his whole thing is that the strong must protect the weak; it's his core belief. his character is premised around this belief, much like the way mothers' constitutions in media are premised on the principle that they'll go to any length for their children.

we're repeatedly shown his caring side during hidden inventory— he cares for riko, he expresses concern for gojo, he even asks about kuroi after he finds out toji supposedly murdered his best friend. it's made very clear that he's an outwardly caring person with a strong sense of duty. in this way, he parallels the textual role of mothers, whose function is to care and provide above all else. the repeated emphasis on his caring nature is what directly likens him to maternity, whose characteristic trait is tender love and care.

he also houses curses in his body. he unleashes them from inside of him, almost like children leaving the womb. these curses obey him and operate according to his will in a very parent/child dynamic. they are powerful, but they can only do what he tells them to do. he uses them to fulfil his duty according to his core belief: to protect the weak.

when he defects, his ideology fundamentally does not change— it just inverts. instead of the strong protecting the weak (the weak necessitating their strength because they can't protect themselves), now the strong must be protected from the weak (because the weak leech the strength from the strong, therefore rendering them weak).

nothing really changes; he still cares —fiercely— it's just in the opposite direction. he takes the tropes associated with motherhood and inverts them— he'll do anything to protect those under his care, including killing, because he wholeheartedly believes in fulfilling his duty as a protector (like a mother). his unwavering conviction and willingness to die for his beliefs (which are directly about those he's protecting) is the most flagrantly maternal thing about him.

toji's worm calls him "mommy" and it's not wrong. he takes in daughters and becomes the central figure of his "family"; his emphasis on family throughout the story (even as a youth) also speaks to his maternity, as mothers are often written as the binding emotional centres of familial structures.

after he dies, his body is taken over by someone who is Iiterally a mother. he embodies monstrous motherhood during life and after death, leading us to the question of what gege is trying to say about all of this. is caring too much a bad thing? does caring in one way open the door to caring in another? what happens when a mother's love, supposedly strong enough to lift fallen trees off their children, goes in the “wrong” direction?

there's also the fact that geto is male. i think gege is also asking us to reckon with how the tropes of maternity have been confined to women, showing us that these intense convictions and the depth of care attributed to mothers can apply to anyone, even (especially) if they are distinctly masculine. in doing this, he's also expanding the conceptual definition of motherhood, suggesting that mothers can exist beyond their provident care and one-dimensional duty to their beloveds.

geto's monstrous motherhood is an explosive reclamation of agency in a trope where women have been historically limited by the categorical imposition of maternity. it seeks to disrupt not only who we consider to be mothers but also what we consider a mother to be. perhaps the monster is not the maternal figure whose love turns vicious or violent, but us, who monstrously imprisoned them in the fixed role of "mother".

[star-child-690]

tagged by @m0ntaigne to do a midyear book rec!!

the singing hills novellas are rereads but i had the loveliest time revisiting them and they’re the most books of all time so i’m deciding they count for this <3 and i’m currently reading qjj but it’s taking up too much space in my brain to not include

tagging @neuronal @generalxiao @torsamors @savitris @dragonji @ghostsign @recapitulation

[ID: images of six book covers, in order from top left to bottom right: the jasmine throne by tasha suri, the empress of salt and fortune and when the tiger came down the mountain by nghi vo, the wrong way to a demon sect leader by yi zhi dayan, golden stage by cang wu bin bai, and qiang jin jiu by tang jiuqing. end ID]

[star-child-690]

“Saved the Public Enemy By Mistake” by Liu Muqiao. Published by Bilibili. English translation here!

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Horrid Past (experimenting on painting style)

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Not to be psychotic on main, but here's every instance of Jason Todd and Bruce Wayne in the Pietà pose that I could find so far

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bruce staring at hal: sometimes i want to kill him, or maybe lightly maim

clark: i think he’s got intergalactic diplomatic immunity, so you literally cannot

bruce, grumbling: you and your diplomatic immunity’s…

[star-child-690]

The best fics are the ones that recognize that although Luke Skywalker may APPEAR on the outside to be a normal friendly twink who happens to have cool powers, especially when contrasted with such ship partners as Boba or Din or even Han, he is arguably the scariest person alive in the galaxy around the prequel era. AND, crucially, he is also a fundamentally weird guy. This man was homeschooled on a rural farm his entire life and then apprenticed to a swamp gremlin who showed him how to tap into the cosmic power of the universe. He blew up the death star age 19, killing approx 2 million-ish Imperials. He is a vortex of Force power that can communicate with the ghosts of dead Jedi. He’s staring into the distance and mumbling to himself and doing Yoda aphorisms and casually pulling out the “yeah I could crush that guy into a paste with my mind (:” and nobody around him knows what to do with that. I think he is a character who has very little frame of reference for how a Jedi or a person in general is supposed to act and there is some thing about him that is by necessity really fucking weird and a little scary but he’s so nice that it can throw you off the scent a little bit. Thanks for coming to my TED talk

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The Mandalorian - The Mines of Mandalore

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Din Djarin is insane. this guy takes his magic 50 year old baby to fifth grade fight club like “my baby wants to fight” and this 11 yr old kid goes uhhhhh dude im not gonna fight a baby he's the size of a rotisserie chicken and Din is like ohhhh ho ho, I just decided my baby's gonna kick your ass extra hard now. and then the baby does a double somersault and completely annihilates him at paintball. funniest shit I've ever seen

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#37 minutes of parent-child bonding time

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sketch dump

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shhhhhhh don't disturb him he is shifting into depeche mode

I mean nothing says gay,horny and religious guilt like DM

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Thinking about early days on the road before John started leaving Sam with Dean and was still going around and talking to hunters trying to learn everything he could. Imagine you’re some hunter and you get a call that the new guy in town wants to meet at the roadhouse and talk demons or werewolves or witches or whatever, then he shows up with a 4-year-old and a baby. He’s real serious and writes down everything you say in his journal but he also has to get up halfway through to sing and bounce a cranky baby to sleep on his shoulder while the kid stares at you with a mouth full of French fries. No wonder every hunter in John’s generation seems to remember Dean and Sam whether Dean and Sam know them or not.

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bobby's boobytraps (supernatural shitpost)

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detective activities