#“welcome to being a person”

[the-mountain-flower]

"It hasn’t really come up yet, but Kendal is ace (noteworthy to him because Vash wasn’t), Alinua is pan but hasn’t really explored it," -Red (Source)

(Takes place in between Chapter 11: Interstitial, and Chapter 12: Lawbringer)

Kendal is coming to terms with who he is as a person.

“Hey, Alinua?” Kendal asked.

“Yeah?” Alinua turned around from where she was growing a small flower. Kendal remembered her saying that’s how she meditates, and felt bad for interrupting that. Still, it felt rude to backtrack now, so he continued.

“Do you think it’d be weird if my sexual orientation were different than Vash?”

“I don’t think so, you are different people. Why?”

“Well, Vash isn’t asexual, but I think I am? I mean, I know I’ve only had less than two sefs to know, but it kind of feels right. Does that make any sense?”

“Yeah, it does.” Alinua looked back at the flower in her hand, and the stem grew longer. “I mean, I ran away from home before it mattered to me, and I hadn’t seen people for a long time before leaving that tree. I’ve got about the same amount of time to really explore how I felt about other people. When it comes to knowing yourself, I don’t really think there’s a ‘normal’ time frame you have to adhere to.”

“That makes sense,” Kendal admitted. “The people of Vash were all different in how they figured themselves out. I guess I just didn’t realize that applied to me too.”

Alinua turned back and smiled at him. “Well hey, just consider it another step in figuring out being a person, like I said earlier.”

Following that, Kendal found himself staring at his hands while deep in thought. It was nice to figure out who he was, even if that was different from the person in most of his memories. He’d only recently come to terms with the fact that he could actually be different from Vash, in more than just technicality. He’d previously been thinking of him as who he used to be, and that just wasn’t right. Earlier, Erin had referred to Vash as Kendal’s parent, and while it was definitely more complicated than that, it felt more right. Vash was who Kendal came from, but that didn’t define who he had to be, right?

“Welcome to being a person.” Alinua’s sentiment from a few days ago echoed in his head. Kendal smiled. It felt good to start knowing who he was.

[kaahmbem]

legend has it that the young witch circe and the once beautiful nymph scylla shared a complicated past...

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

i have a Scene - a Plot if you will - that backs this as context. y'all are gonna have to trust me on this one <3 or read the tags...

[crumb-crumblet-s-crumbington]

willingly unloved

[xxplastic-cubexx]

Marvel Meow (2021), Nao Fuji | Professor X and Magneto

Bonus:

[vaguely-concerned]

the fact that irving canonically survives through the end of asunder to be at wynne's funeral is so fucking funny to me. nothing but love and respect for MY unstoppable cockroach morally grey machiavellian mage dad!!! he's survived in his position through multiple attempted rites of annulment and blood mage plots popping up left right and center around him. the chantry keeps trying to stamp him out but his dodge game is simply out of this world, divine. civil wars, political machinations and minefields, chantry atrocities, this wily old motherfucker is dodging and weaving his way through it all, not-quite-no-hits-taken-running-it-but-honestly-close-enough-under-the-circumstances style. if solas does succeed in tearing down the veil I would fully believe that one of the like three people still alive at the end of it all would be a very weary 90 year old first enchanter irving going 'oh this shit again huh'. the maker has cursed him for his hubris and his paperwork is never finished (affectionate, it's fine he canonically loves paperwork)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Average Drama Enjoyer observes some peak drama.

[loriache]

Falin's Nightmare

[das-a-kirby-blog]

perhaps if we don't put others down, they would be willing to listen to the points we have to make

[pickled-flowers]

Ok so a while back I had a conversation with my friend's aunt. She's a trans woman well into her 50, who has kids and grandkids, and she came out when she was in her 40's. Me and my friends were talking about our queer space, and mentioned the well known "token cishet man"

Now, I'm sure most of us have that guy in our friend group, and it was common for us to just call him the straight guy. But my friend's aunt offered a different perspective ; she once was that token cishet man in a queer group of friends. Getting categorized so strongly as "the cis straight guy" made it harder for her to come out and accept herself. Since that talk with her, I've been careful about it, and guess what? Two women I've once called "the straightest person I know" (different occasions, and it was high school) now have girlfriends! You literally cannot know if someone is queer, and honestly most people are not the straight cisest person out there.

Anyways I'm not very articulate and English is not my friend but like I think everyone would benefit from being a little more careful about the way we treat our "token straight guy", she might be thankful later!

[blueskittlesart]

idk if anyone else has gotten the beta for the new communities feature but these features in particular are a little bit concerning to me. i haven't tested this, but it looks to be an entirely separate comment section that's hidden from the post's op if they're not in the community, meaning you're removing a creator's ability to moderate the comment section surrounding their work. this is especially concerning for me as a creator who produces content related to transness and gender identity--moderating my comments is often a constant daily struggle to keep bigots from having their way with my posts, and this seems like it has the potential to remove or at least significantly impair my ability to moderate who engages with my content and how. Also, on a site that's had major problems with transphobic and racist harassment in the past, i can see this very quickly devolving into a way to dogpile on certain users or even organize the kind of harassment campaigns we KNOW certain people on this site are prone to engage in with no way for any outsiders to even WITNESS what's going down. At the very least i think the op of a post reblogged into a community needs to have access to the community comments (which may already be a feature--like i said i haven't tested it yet but this explanation reads to me like they don't) but on a larger scale i think the devs for this site NEED to think about the potential for misuse when putting out new features like this because this just looks like a nightmare waiting to happen to me

[hardcenturion3]

Yet again, motherfucking Tumblr terminates the last account (4th time) while allowing straight porn accounts with full tits hanging out all over and bush AND VULVA /VAGINA to be shown and THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM but if you show any PENIS OR ANY FORM OF THE NAKED MALE ANATOMY YOU WILL BE BANNED/ACCOUNT TERMINATED.

This is called HOMOPHOBIC DISCRIMINATION BY SEXUAL ORIENTATION. It is very very simple. So I have taken screenshots of examples of straight porn that is readily available on Tumblr and will be including this in my submission to CRTC when the filing is made for HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. Canada 🇨🇦 and other civilized countries do not put up with this BULLSHIT. SO FUCK YOU COCKSUCKING BASTARDS. YOU SHOULD BE RESTORING MY ACCOUNT. 4500 follows and 1600 followers over 3+ months. That’s significant effort. Why should I have to start from scratch again??? So many of us are in the same position. We are discriminated against just because our interests are not straight content. That’s called DISCRIMINATION. And you’re based in NY STATE??? Good!!! They will FUCK YOU UP!!! They don’t put up with anti-LGBT DISCRIMINATION THERE.

Now back to reality… unfortunately I MUST REPOST THIS CASE STUDY in acute psychosis and narcissistic personality disorder.

@uselessandgay and @usefulandgay really are out of their goddamn minds. It’s scary. And the lunatics willing to part money to look at their completely unaesthetic bodies… Your ass is just fat; your chest is oddly shaped and now your head looks disproportionately minuscule especially with that pencil neck. It’s bizarre. I know times might be tough but goddamn boys!!! Save your money for a dildo or a gigolo something if you’re that desperate rather than feeding these two queens’ addiction to themselves; they get off to the mirror

🍆💦💦💦.

As a “naturopathic doctor” please avail yourself of a real medical doctor and get to a psychiatrist. What you are doing is NOT HEALTHY for yourselves or those around you. Nobody really believes what you tell them and the amount of time that they play along with your delusions is grandeur after not infinite.

[snoodlebooper]

fuck it- i saw another artist post their fankid design and that reminded me that i havent posted any artwork of mine. so here!

i drew these a long time ago. shes my baby and i love her so much!!! her name is honey pillar and shes a little ball of fuzzy sunshine!!

((but now that i updated my character i feel like she needs a little update herself.... coming soon ig??))

[clownsuu]

Small detour of what I usually post, but I absolutely wish (other) clown the best of luck during these confusing and almost hopeless times- nobody knows how to deal with such amount of attention in such short amount of time- a blessing and a curse to behold

[kahluah]

*puts hand up* sorry I’m very new here what’s the context with what’s happening with the tag war??

Alright, I will give my run down, but I will not be naming any blog names on either side even if I have the info and the action was net positive. I just like to use my blog to scroll and reblog for the most part and refuse to embroil myself in the drama more than just giving my view on it as a bystander. One that definitely has an opinion on the events, but also as someone who would rather curate my own experience than fight.

So all this fighting that is going on, it used to just happen in the normal "Jiang Cheng" tag because back then there was no "canon Jiang Cheng" tag; it had not been created yet. (By that I mean it was not a tag used as a tag, Tumblr's shitty search algorithm might still show posts if one typed it in to the search bar because those posts had the words 'canon', 'Jiang', and 'Cheng' in the tags separately, but there would not be posts with "#canon Jiang Cheng" because nobody normally creates a post with a tag like that when "#Jiang Cheng" was suffice. Sometimes I see irrelevant posts in the canon Jiang Cheng tag, but the actual tag isn't on the post, the tags just happen to have all three words in them. Those I ignore because that is Tumblr's fault, not the poster.)

The fighting was between people that like the character and prefer to see the good in him and the interpretation of his character, and those that may or may not like the character (just because you like a character does not mean you need to defend their every action after all) but do not share that opinion of his character and have a more neutral or negative portrayal by contrast. The former also tended to favor or have only read the novel as it is the source material for all other adaptations.

Now things really came to a head when hate and threats were being thrown about on posts that were just quotes from the book showing the negative actions of Jiang Cheng. The people posting the quotes were basically told "if you hate the character why don't you just tag the post as anti-JC?!" but is it really right to call those anti posts when they were posting how the character acts in the source material? That is the character. That is how he acted. Look it is in the book! The character really did that! It is not somebody's negative headcanon that the character may act like that, it is something the character actually did. Personally I can not consider that as an anti character post, and neither did the people who made posts like that.

But things did get heated enough that some people finally took a step back and said "Fine. You want us to make our own space to make these posts so that you do not have to see us talk about JC this way? We will. It will be #canon Jiang Cheng and you can block it if you don't want to see the posts." Was the name picked in the spirit of schadenfreude? Very probable, but it is also not an incorrect name as the people who wanted to use it base their opinion on the novel. But the point was that the tag was created so that people now had their own space to make the posts they wanted and those that did not want to see it could block the tag. Curate your own experience; we can block tags on this site for a reason and advertising tags to block is a courtesy. (Because as said previously, the search here sucks, because the posts contain the character's name they are still likely to show up in the main tag, but block the newly created tag and you will not see those posts either way). Could the other people come into the tag in good faith and make arguments with textual support? Yeah, that was welcomed, but in the spirit of debate they should expect rebuttal. Was that what happened? No.

No instead what happened was basically this meme

They did not like the name chosen for the tag. They read the novel too and still believe that JC is good, so they should be able to use the tag too! Never mind the fact that the tag was made so they could block the posts they didn't want to see. So that they can go on with their days no longer having to deal with the people they constantly fought with. No. Instead of curating the experience of this website, they would get so hung up on the fact that there was now a tag called #canon Jiang Cheng in use that they had to use it too to defend JC from the people that post 'negative' things about him; even if it is novel text!

So while the fighting didn't stop, it did get slightly better because not everyone felt the need to jump into the new tag to defend their fave. Some people actually did curate their experience. Plus there is a block button and people do use it, so things got to a point where I would say it was relatively stable even if there was still fights here and there. (But once again I lurk, I do not participate. Things may not have been the same for more outspoken people).

But then a certain muskrat bought Twitter and a chunk of the fandom there fled here. That's when the main push to "reclaim the tag" and the new influx of people hopping into the tag to argue and defend their fave appeared. These people did not know why the tag was made, they just saw blogs that they liked telling people about the "JC-antis" that made it and how with the new people pouring into the Tumblr fandom from twitter, they had a chance to flood it and reclaim it. And since then the fighting has not really stopped.

As for what has happened in the past few days, you have JC defenders flooding the tag with fan art (not canon), screen caps from CLQ (not canon), and screenshots of a sentence or two from the novel (canon, but usually out of context or lacking additional lines that go on to rebut what was previously said) in the tag and the people who made the tag for a specific purpose getting mad about the spam. (I block so I have no clue how big the influx was or whatever but there was definitely like at least 3 new people I had to block). So when they made posts venting the anger, you got JC defenders coming back to them and going "But I never sent any hate or harassment! I just used the tag to talk about the canon character!" And perhaps they didn't, but these people in their defense always ignore and never respond to the question of why they are in the tag instead of blocking it because that is what the tag was made for. Instead they come back with "Well if you want to talk about JC that way, why don't you post in the anti tag or make your own tag!"... Remember that meme picture I used above. Yup.

The tag war began because people did not like negative posts about JC in the main character tag for JC. When told to use the anti tag or make a new tag, a new tag was made, but instead of curating the experience the stans of JC got so tilted at the name of the tag that they decided that they would come into the tag and continue the fight instead of just blocking it. Twitter fallout made the fighting worse. And now we have come full circle to the JC stans once again telling people to just use the anti tag or make their own tag.

[friendlyengie]

For some reason we are scoutposting. Drawing him with his stupid Tom jones tattoo because it is forever funny to me, and some recycled scout ocs that I’ve been wanting to draw .

tried to transcript my writing and the text screenshots in the alt text bc I keep writing so much shit on my sketches and it’s probably not very easy to read !!!