#<- let's not lie to ourselves

[syneester]

Will you carry my heart around When it's old and grey? Will you stay until we fade away?

[that1notetaker]

In which Lucifer starts getting comfortable, forgets social boundaries, and Alastor kind of does so too. Nifty takes 1 interaction and makes it a whole plot.

[kataraavatara]

nessian moodboard

[dayurno]

this is somewhat of a vent post & something i said i would not do again but has been plaguing me enough that i think getting it out might feel better. so. has anydoggy else been. Baffled and upset by nora sakavic’s refusal to speak on how terribly aftg has treated its characters of color? with the author of the series coming back with a new book and starting up on her online activity again, and questions of what she’d change about aftg bubbling up, it’s particularly glaring to me that we are all playing this very long game of pretend where we ignore how badly the non-white cast has been treated & her lack of thoughts on it

and i understand not wanting to bring up nicky and thea because people pick on her for it. i’m not trying to discredit nora sakavic’s terrible history of getting harrassed online by aftg fans. but i think it is very cynical, and it is very juvenile, and most of all very cruel, that she gets to ignore the very real ways the books have set up these characters to be hated. i think it’s obvious why the characters who get the most hate are the only canonical characters of color, and i think we do not get to treat this like a deliberate decision on the fandom’s part when the books have put these same characters in degrading and embarrassing and terrible positions in the first place. aftg is not a story about nice characters with clean pasts, but there is a very specific nastiness to the only characters of color being a brown man who sexually harasses and later assaults the main character, a black woman whose only scene is her lashing out at her love interest after being ignored for the first two books, and the japanese villain who gets maybe two lines of complexity before he goes back to being a terrible person. the white cast, in comparison, while not at all free from flaws, are never shown to commit mindless evil; all of their actions are ultimately justified. the book goes out of its way to give them concession after concession. we know exactly who to side with, because aftg tells us who these people are. does nicky’s assault ever get addressed in the books? does riko’s reasoning to be the way that he is ever gets more than briefly aluded to? is thea reserved even a shred of humanity or grace in her one scene?

anyway. it’s been years of talking about this and the fandom has been constantly hostile to criticism in this regard, and more recently any criticism at all, and it’s Grating to be on the other side of this discussion. it’s exhausting to know that in ten years we do not get even an acknowledgment besides the author saying she will not answer questions about nicky and thea anymore. it’s upsetting and it’s ugly and i wish no one had to talk about this again, but we do because what i thought was common sense has been washed away by a sudden influx of no-nuance adoration for the trilogy. basically i hope we all explode

[mr-stottlemonk]

Leland, flirting: Help me out with my tie?

Adrian, smiling back flirtingly: i'd love to

Adrian: *spends nearly an hour tying Leland's tie*

[gofancyninjaworld]

No one is born knowing how to communicate

A: And that's okay...

Dr Kuseno made it look so easy. He just swanned into Saitama's apartment, proferred him a gift of beef and the hero's hostility melted away.

Fubuki felt positively foolish, and yet encouraged.

Since then, however, she's found that the only thing meat bribes pull in are dogs. Literal dogs:

And even dogs need more than meat to be loyal.

What gives? Well, it's obvious that Fubuki mistook Dr Kuseno's gift for a bribe: more on that later. Probably. And yeah, it's funny, but it's more interesting than that.

Learning how to communicate is complex. There are a ludicrous number of unspoken conventions and rules in every human society, so much so that we don't fully learn how to smile socially until we're in our forties. Dr Kuseno carefully judged his gift: he had a legitimate reason to offer Saitama a gift in the first place, out of gratitude for Saitama going out of his way to mentor Genos. Then he chose a gift Saitama would be sure to appreciate and presented it at a time when Saitama would be thinking about dinner. The worst that could have happened is that Saitama took the gift but insisted on the doctor going home (and taking Genos with him) -- it would still have left the desired positive impression. And things went really well. Kuseno made it look effortless.

Fubuki is only in her early twenties and her experience to date has been far from typical. She's learned that either she can intimidate people or she can flatter them into doing what she wants. With Saitama (and later Bang, Bomb, and Kuseno), she has to learn how to talk to more powerful people whom she cannot overpower, over whom she has no leverage, and who are unimpressed by her looks, simpering, or flattery.

Fortunately, Fubuki is nothing if not astute. She's worked out that she needs to develop complementary skills if she's to make herself useful to the S-Class heroes she wants to hang with. How to talk to them to get the help and cooperation she desires? Ah, that's a work in progress.

B: ...Unless it's not

Let's move onto another miscommunication.

Something that I hadn't before was that, unlike the webcomic version where Saitama only thinks to himself that Genos seems depressed, in the manga, Saitama out and out asks him if this is the case. He wants to know.

It mirrors King asking Saitama that very same question and getting Saitama to open up and be vulnerable for the first time (ever, in any version of the story). So it is very appropriate to see Saitama trying to do the same for Genos, particularly as he is openly fond of the guy.

However, it goes wrong. Saitama feels himself under pressure to say something wise to make it better. So he puts on his best 'confident' face and inadvertently makes everything much worse. Oh dear. What makes this particularly painful in the manga is that Saitama is much more invested in trying to reach Genos, and it's made Genos think that Saitama saying that he doesn't see what he's doing must mean that earlier times when he's praised him must have been just Saitama being nice. For sure, Genos could have pushed back and made Saitama clarify what he meant, but he's even worse at communicating: and Saitama's glib remark about being bright struck him square in the insecurities.

I'm going to come to something that I only realised once I started typing this up. Even though I've pointed out their abilities to communicate, neither King nor Kuseno have the perfect words to say. Kuseno started out by first committing a faux pas in bringing his great big outside boots into Saitama's flat, then nearly boring Saitama to death with a long-winded explanation. King started out by trying to guess what was bothering Saitama. Both, however, did the most important thing about effective communication: they picked up on their going wrong and changed tack.

It's not about saying the right thing: it's about responding to the person you're talking to.

The thing that King did that Saitama was trying to do for Genos was to ask Saitama open questions, and shut up in the interim, letting Saitama talk to fill in the silence. He'd only speak to ask more open questions when Saitama ran out of things to say, and through that, gently started to challenge Saitama's thinking.

But doing so means being comfortable with several seconds of silence. And that is excruciating. It is almost irresistible to jump in and say something, anything. And it would have been a longish wait, for Genos to slowly sit down and decide to start speaking, which might well have started being about something only tangentially related to his worry. King did that for Saitama: Saitama started out talking about what was bothering him on the surface -- being too strong -- before eventually coming to what was really bothering him, feeling lonely and profoundly isolated from everyone around him. Saitama does not yet know how to wait a person out.

It's a problem in this case because it's introduced a big barrier between those two, not an insurmountable one for sure, but one that could easily compound later.

Ah well, no one is born a communicator. We just have to wait and see if they work out a way to open up and be honest with each other. So it goes! There's more ways to introduce conflicts than to have a monster trample Tokyo, after all!

And so help me, the struggle to learn how to communicate is 1000% worthwhile.

[doodle17]

If you could pick a certain studio to make a Psychonauts movie who would it be?

I'll go first, I think Laika or Illumination would be able to pull the characters designs off really well, and their animation in general is just *chefs kiss*

[emblazons]

WARNING: FFVII spoilers + ship talk—scroll if you want to skip, because I am simply commentating my own gaming experience & not trying to start a war in the comments

-

It’s the way I’m DESPERATELY trying to play FFVII with an openness to Cloud and Aerith because I know it means so much to so many people—and yet even when I go to YouTube and watch alt versions of mandatory scenes I cannot fathom how people are missing the subtext of “Aerith knows and acknowledges Tifa is so much more than Cloud’s friend even as she wants his attention because she doesn’t know if he’s really himself, has been extremely lonely since Zack left + knows somewhere she’s going to die for herself” ☠️

Like I am 3000% for FF ships that have a lot of groundwork but aren’t primary canon, because Square is notorious for building true chemistry between people who are not ever canonically romantic (hello Phoenixflare) but…it’s getting kind of absurd to see how many people are denying the subtext of Aerith as secondary to Tifa solely because they love their ship.

Perfect example: the scene where Aerith goes up on the Nebelheim water tower (a place wholly and entirely tied to Cloud and Tifa’s ongoing relatonship) and asks Cloud about his town…only for us to get this:

As someone who just consumes media generally…the whole subtext of the scene is clearly that Aerith trying to 1) pull Cloud’s actual memories up from the mind muck he’s going through (something she and Tifa both do repeatedly) and 2) remind Cloud of the side of him that inherently has always had a whole ass crush on his childhood best friend to help jog his memory.

Sure, it reads as a cute moment between them if you want that…but if you’re paying attention to the purpose of the scene itself and what’s being said (verbally and subtextually)…it’s astronomically clear this is a Cloud x Tifa recognition delivered to the audience through a Cloud/Aerith moment…and this happens repeatedly ☠️

And then…immediately after having her be upset that she doesn’t have someone the way Cloud has Tifa, and asking to be alone? I…I just. Like it’s so hard to be here in the middle of a war about “optional scenes” when shit that happens to everyone happens just like this 😭

[aaandbackstabbed]

Scrooge: you’re such a liar!

Goldie: what, I can’t even lie to you anymore?

Goldie: you’re so demanding

[isatoru]

oikawa could beat sukuna but he could not survive a day in blue lock

[trickostars]

gay friend groups sure are crazy

[wilchur]

Since we're all putting chronic conditions in our versions of Enver Gortash today...

I have this personal headcanon that the gauntlets are aids/pain relief too. Something related to having his hands smashed or fingers broken enough times that the bones and joints are permanently disfigured and cause pain/tremors without the enchantment that has been placed on the gauntlets. I also saw some fanart the other day where the golden sleeves were actually fused to his skin, but unless he's an amputee, that screams "magical enhancement" more than anything. Still something I think about a normal amount, though.

[maddyshome]

i love how atlus made such a emotional and actually romantic relationship without it even being a relationship. like the other romantic interests simply fade in front of akechi. is it because akiren is a defined character when interacting with akechi? probably yes. he has no need of the players input. 

[velarisdusk]

i regret my birthday actions over these last 4 days (drinking until i'm juuuust on the verge of blacking out). my head is pounding, i feel sick to my stomach, i've got 2 assignments, a quiz, and a project due at midnight, and all i've had for breakfast is a newport

[lukaherehelp]

It fuckin flew past me... He asked for art room 609. I'm -

[diamondzart]

More of my thoughts about possible interactions between Wild Knuckles and Dr. Nefario after the events of “The Rise Of Gru”

This sketch is drawn by me and colored by @timeteas-blog

When Gru just brings Nefario to their team, Wild Knuckles distrusts him. Because Nefario worked for the Vicious Six, and originally Wild Knuckles was his boss, and then Belle Bottom became his new boss for obvious reasons. Nefario swears to Wild Knuckles that he didn't know they were plotting against him. But of course Wild Knuckles does not believe him and believes that Nefario simply kept silent about it, pretending that he is not in business.

So in the beginning, Wild Knuckles' attitude towards Nefario is on the edge of distaste. But Nefario is cunning, he knows that Wild Knuckles won't kill him because he is someone Gru sees as a good friend (and eventually a father figure), and Gru will be, to put it mildly, quite upset if his "personal scientist" is found in some alleyway with a bullet hole between his eyes. So Nefario just starts to show off maliciously every time Wild Knuckles reminds him that he has the motivation to kill him. But since Gru has no money, Wild Knuckles is the one who pays Nefario for working with him. So it turns out that there is such a vicious triangle, in which one member is constantly being on the metaphorically gunpoint.

Or, in a nutshell:

But over time, of course, they grow stronger as a team, Wild Knuckles gradually ceases to threaten Nefario at any opportunity and begins to understand that he really did not know about Belle Bottom’s plans, and Nefario starts feeling on surer ground and begins to get impudent, gradually descending to jokingly calling Wild Knuckles an "old fart" and goofing around without any second thoughts. Which eventually leads to this post :)