#(certain kinds at least)

[stuckinapril]

friend wanted to see my tumblr, and when i told him i can’t show it to him bc it’s basically my personal diary he went “oh so I can’t see it but a bunch of strangers on tumblr can??” he literally does not get me. no one will get me like the people in my phone get me

[pixlatedvampire]

hi the literal whole entire reason i made these was bc i watched this 10 sec clip on youtube pls watch

[the-witchhunter]

DP x DC: Homme Fatale

Noun. homme fatal (plural hommes fatals) An ultimately seductive and dangerous man; a womanizer.

On a bit of a Film Noir kick right now, so blame that

Imagine, if you will:

Danny, a private eye in Gotham, ever the hard boiled detective, sitting in his dark office, drinking coffee you could use to tar a roof. The office isn't in a good neighborhood but rent still ain't cheap. He's fixing to get a new case on his desk soon

Enter one Timothy Drake-Wayne, CEO of Wayne Enterprizes. He walked in shirt unbuttoned dangerously low in a suit sharp enough to cut yourself on and bags under his eyes to large to be counted as carry on. Mr. Drake has a job for him, one he wants to keep quite, and one important enough that he's willing to add a couple zeros to Danny's usual rate. This job is a dream come true... almost too good to be true...

or

Tim Drake aka Red Robin(yummm) needs plausible deniability on a case tied to his civilian identity and so hires a PI and lays down a trail of clues for him. All the while playing up the Noir tropes to flirt with the cute detective.

why doesn't he just take care of it as Red Robin? Shhhhh... the detective is cute and he's having too much fun playing the homme fatale

Bonus: Immediately after wrapping up Tim's case Kon walks into Danny's office dolled up in a vintage dress, period appropriate makeup done, all to play the part of the Femme Fatale and do the exact same thing Tim did. Does he know Tim literally just did that? Maybe, maybe not

[crustyfloor]

[lunaryhues]

Me: "Can I please use all this energy to draw on an actual project"

My brain: "You will draw the same character over and over and you will like it."

Me: "Okay."

[puppyeared]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[epickiya722]

"Megumi wants Yuji to be with his sister."

How? The fan translation states "walked off beside someone like you, Itadori" not "walked off beside you, Itadori". Clearly (apparently, not, my bad), Megumi was making a comparison.

If he is really trying to state something here about his sister's love life (which is weird, let's be real), he is probably trying to say he wants Tsumiki to have a partner that is a good person just as she and Yuji are.

Even with the framing, I don't think this is him imaging Tsumiki and Yuji dating. It's him imagining the most important, most cherished people in his life. Tsumiki, the only family he really has ever known and Yuji, the boy who has done everything he can to help Megumi since the day they met and forming a bond with him.

Also, when in the manga has Megumi actually been interested in looking for a partner for Tsumiki? He was trying to save her from the coma she got put in! And then later, save her from the Culling Games!

And just Megumi being Megumi, him playing matchmaker for his sister is so off!

"But what about the thing with Yuko?"

Megumi was a spectator if anything else, let's be real. It was Nobara helping Yuko out and Megumi was just there to react and answer questions.(Hell, Nobara even later got agitated at the idea of Yuji getting a partner before she does.) He brought a book with him, for crying out loud. Does that seem like someone who is trying to play matchmaker?

Him putting up a ten points sign was just another scene of him being impressed by Yuji. It was no different from when he said Yuji could beat any of them in a hand to hand fight without cursed energy involved or when he complimented straight to Yuji about how adaptable he is in a fight.

He wanted Yuji's life spared because he couldn't see another good person die. Not because "my comatose sister needs a boyfriend".

If Megumi wanted Tsumiki and Yuji to be "a couple", then how come he never bragged about how great of a person she is after Yuji (and Nobara) learned about her? How come he only told Yuji to "save him" and not "save Tsumiki" when he wanted help to save Tsumiki?

I already seeing people make the "Fushiguro wants the bloodline continued" "jokes" and honestly, ew, gross.

Maybe, it's just me, but it's feels invasive at the thought of one sibling trying to shape another sibling's love life.

Hell, even still, Megumi pushing Yuji to date his sister? He would really try to get Yuji to do that without considering how Yuji feels? For real?

It's him wishing that his sister had someone who she can also form a bond with just as he had with Yuji and for that someone to be like Yuji.

I'm actually surprised to not see those same people making the "Megumi wants Yuji and Tsumiki to date" even make a remark on Yuji saying how lonely he would be without Megumi.

Is it because you can't interpret it any other way than how much Yuji cares about Megumi? Because, didn't not too long ago people were trying to say Yuji didn't care for him? Now that the last two chapters (265 - 266) disproved that AGAIN, I feel like these people are grasping at straws to come up with anything to not admit that there are mutual feelings between Yuji and Megumi.

Same fandom were some people were making incest jokes at Megumi's expense so now he's "beating the allegations" that were never there in the first place. Huh? What?

[asurrogateblog]

The Syd Poll

the topic of this poll is one that is frequently avoided in the pink floyd fandom, but inevitably one we all consider – our individual views on what we think caused syd's psychological struggles (and by extension, led to his departure from the band). I think that – at least in this neighborhood of tumblr – this is a conversation we are capable of having in a way that is civil, nuanced, and at least minimally disrespectful to syd.

So, to help facilitate this, here are some ground rules:

let's all assume we have a mutual understanding of the complexities of this. syd could never actually be reduced down to a poll, and all of our viewpoints are limited in various ways

the poll options just serve as just a conversation starter, and responses are not necessarily a statement of absolute beliefs

feel free to discuss as much or as little of your own perspective as you feel comfortable sharing.

in the case that debates break out, please try to assume good intent – and also demonstrate it (unless, for instance, someone is being blatantly insulting beyond a misunderstanding that needs correcting)

please do NOT vote if you are not actually a pink floyd fan with at least basic knowledge about what we're talking about here.

The options I've included below are not meant to be exhaustive, they are simply the "theories" that I have seen most commonly circulated. I have also decided not to include combinations. I'm fairly sure we'd all agree multiple factors were involved. Rather than make the poll too complicated, I ask you to instead select the one that you think is the "most" important to your viewpoint, and clarify further in your tags/comments as you wish.

so. here we go.

READ BEFORE VOTING ^^^^

(note of correction: "late-onset schizophrenia" should just be "schizophrenia". the typical timeline for onset of symptoms is late adolescence/early adulthood, so syd would've been well within that period at the time)

[anghraine]

Speaking of the sidelining of Elizabeth's arc in pop culture/fandom takes on P&P, I do have a more uncharitable than usual speculation about it:

I don't think Elizabeth is written as an audience stand-in in a general sense. But the novel does give audiences a carefully-constructed space to fuck up in the same ways that Elizabeth does.

The audience participating in Elizabeth's flawed patterns of thinking and reacting and engaging with other people is not equivalent to Elizabeth doing it in-story. But I think the novel is more broadly concerned with these kinds of patterns in ways of thinking and approaching the world and especially approaching people in the world than with it as a purely in-story thing.

The novel's exact central turning point is Elizabeth's horrified epiphany about her faults following Darcy's letter. That moment is integral to Elizabeth's characterization, but much of what she says of herself and how she's been approaching the world could be fairly turned on much of the audience because of how the book is constructed. This construction is very clearly deliberate.

It's easy to feel like Elizabeth's flaws and mistakes are not really a big deal when it's stuff we ourselves do all the time and when the person doing them is as generally admirable and engaging as Elizabeth. But while she overstates things in the horror of the moment, the novel still insists that the flaws in her approach are a big deal, ethically. They are morally wrong. Elizabeth has to struggle to grow past those patterns and flaws, however imperfectly, and I think there's an implicit challenge in that: so should we.

tbh I suspect that challenge is really uncomfortable for some people to think about too hard, and that's part of the reason there's so much flailing to make the book centrally about anything else.

[throwawayasoiafaccount]

When I see stuff like this I kinda want to bash my head into a wall:

To start off, I’m not sure whether this person was commenting on book or show Cersei, but honestly, it doesn’t even matter because she’s so much more than the ‘ambitious villain’ or the ‘murderous girlboss’ tropes in both the book and show.

(Of course, I do have my issues with the way Cersei was written in the show like most people but this is simply a rant post so I’m not going to go through the differences of Show vs Book Cersei)

Cersei is a female character who was shaped by her environment, who’s insecurities were created by her environment, and she’s a woman who’s idiotic mistakes can be traced back to how her environment shaped her. She’s much more than a murderous girlboss, she’s both a victim of the system and also a beneficiary of it, while also acting as an agent of it to keep the status quo while also desiring what the system denied her.

Cersei is NUANCED and complicated and even now people hate that about her and want her to have been a purely evil woman handcrafted in a vacuum, ignoring the context of her life because readers would rather not engage with Cersei’s victimhood and nuances because that ruins their idea of: She Was The Problem and Always The Problem. (People would rather say that she deserved her walk of shame instead of interacting meaningfully with the theme of systematic gender-based violence that is so prevalent in Cersei’s story. The exploration of patriarchal violence in Show Alicent’s story is done so horribly in comparison.)

And what really pissed me off about these tags is that this person has clearly decided that they don’t care to interact with the nuance of Cersei and are fine with flattening her, and yet they shit on others for not liking Alicent.

Because of the way Alicent is written in this show, she almost always has a ‘woe is me I can do no wrong’ attitude, which of course drives people away from the character (woe is me I deserve to take a child’s eye 🥺). However, what actually annoys me is how she’s made out to be stupid, foolish, ignorant, and inconsistent due to the horrible writing of this show, all of which are deviations from her book characterization. Also, I despise it when people want me to support writing decisions and changes made in adaptations that are downright misogynistic and are meant to attract the male gaze.

But what pisses many people, including myself, off is how the changes made negatively impacted many other characters. Alicent’s terrible characterization is like a black hole that distorts and warps the whole story! It’s annoying af!

So when people like this say: ‘She’s nuanced and people just can’t handle it 🙄;’ I say: No. She’s horribly written and a different character from the book and people have a right to be critical about these changes that stripped a female character of 1) her agency and 2) her intelligence!

And the thing is, there was little reason for the writers to have made all these changes to Alicent’s characterization! In the book she is an interesting character with clear motives and understandable reactions. She’s cunning and ambitious and acts the way a noble lady who became queen would. And despite her clear ambitions and dislike of Rhaenyra, she still makes a comment wondering about who would protect the Princess from Ser Criston, and yet she then takes Cole into her service after his falling out with Rhaenyra. That’s a perfect example of nuance! Show Alicent could never compare to book Alicent’s clear moral values and consistent disregard of said moral values in pursuit of power.

And because of this, Book Alicent isn’t easy to stomach. It’s hard for most people to come to terms with a character like her and it’s even harder for people to feel sympathetic for her at the end when she went mad with grief.

On the other hand, Show Alicent was designed in a way to garner pity, and when the writers felt like her current arc wouldn’t be enough to garner the specific reaction they wanted they would then throw in a time skip and suddenly she’s completely different and yet still Thee victim. She’s designed to be as sympathetic as fucking possible! The camera angles, the background music, and the lighting is set up in a way to make sure you the viewer feels pity or sympathy for her! Cause that’s her role in this series! She’s thee Ultimate Victim!

But too bad for the writers as many people are fed up with this kind of inconsistent writing. Even when the writers created a whole new challenge for Alicent where she’s shitted on by the green council and forced to face the beast she helped to raise, I and many others could never feel any satisfaction as it was clear that once again Alicent was being made to be Thee Ultimate Victim who was just led astray by the patriarchy and was a victim of it and was only just realizing it so don’t you pity her don’t you feel sad for her and now she’s trying to do the right thing so pls pls pls pity her 🥺~ So it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are annoyed by these eNLiGhtEnEd changes that have led to a complete deviation from the source material.

To summarize: Cersei is an excellent fucking character who’s by no means easy to stomach, and because she’s not easy to stomach she’s often reduced to annoying ass tropes by dumbasses who are reading above their comprehension level. But when you actually try to understand her, you can easily see why she turned out the way she did and you can feel sympathy for her while understanding that she’s both victim and perpetrator! On the other hand, Show Alicent is a mess and HOTD is trying to make her serve a different narrative role than she did in the books so ofc people are going to be unhappy with the changes as book readers are once again faced with the annoying reality that the writers don’t give a fuck about the source material.

[sysig]

Maybe requestober prompt of soft?

Day 5 - Pile o' plushies

[aroaceleovaldez]

emo Nico x scene Will Solace...

[the-acid-pear]

Honestly the best part about True Neutral Jack to me is the fact he... doesn't even really care for the money. Sure he cares about the business growing and expanding but like, in his personal life? He's not doing shit with it for what we see. Like he's not this capitalist sigma grinder type with big dreams or goals like owning a mansion or some shit. Like im sure even if he was a millonaire he'd still be wearing the same suit and living in the same house and likely using the same cheap paint. He just needed a hobbie to run from the skeletons in his closet.

[morrigan-sims]

Royal Horses

@morningstarequestrian's new Baroque Tack Set is absolutely perfect for tacking up the horses from my story save. (which I've been neglecting for the past year+) (Other pieces are from the Medieval Tack Set or the Medieval Round Bridle. The first outfits are from @objuct's Traditional Arabian Set, plus one of my recolors of that set.)

(also obligatory tagging @simgerale because Phillip pics.)

The first two outfits are something I could see being like, a parade outfit, at least for Alena. (Kristopher wouldn't be involved in any parades back in Oryn, I just wanted to test out all my cc.) Especially the version with the tassels isn't practical for just recreational riding, but it certainly looks nice for a parade, and does resemble parade-type outfits.

Alena's 2nd-3rd outfits and Phillip's 2nd-4th outfits are just more general-purpose riding. Two different saddles each and a few different saddle pads for Phillip.

Phillip's 5th outfit and Alena's 4th and 5th are potentially more of long-distance setups. Maybe like some kind of tour, where Fallon would be riding for long distances, but still want to look formal / be seen by people. (Again, not really something Kristopher and Phillip would have been doing, but it looked good on him and I wanted to test stuff out.) Alena has a second variation because technically white isn't one of Anvia's royal colors, but black is, so if it was a public event, she might tack in black. Especially as that would show less wear and dirt than the white for long travel.

The last pic is a blanket for Phillip because it gets cold in Oryn, especially in the winter and late fall/early spring. Alena doesn't really need a blanket most of the time, since Anvia's winters are much milder. (They don't often get snow, and when they do it's rarely more than an inch or two at a time.)

[grassoftunnel]

My greatest wish is for Natsuhi to be happy and indulged okayyyy

bonus

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The whole discourse about the privacy/secrecy/support thing has been sitting with me for a few days (I mean other than it always does to a certain degree) thanks to all the excellent discussion happening and I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but I think what we're seeing and what we're going to learn (e.g. from TTPD) is that it wasn't just the support issue, but how it was shown/handled.

We've all gone out of our way to show that introversion =/= lack of support. Someone can be shy, reserved, etc. and still show up for their partner, whether in public or at home. To chalk any of the differences up to the clash between introversion and extroversion is unfair to folks who count themselves among either tbh.

@thisisctrying said something the other day that hit the nail on the head about how if that support had been offered in private, there very well may not have been a Joever to begin with, or at least not at this point in time. (Sorry for loosely paraphrasing, and for namedropping you! Long time listener, first time poster.)

If this were a case where the "shy" partner said, "I am really uncomfortable with the spotlight personally and do not want to court it, but I will support you in your ambitions and offer you whatever you need to make them happen and make the glare bearable," I suspect that would have gone a long way to making Taylor feel seen and comfortable in pursuing her goals in the way that she now has. Again, that might have been more akin to the balance that seemed to have been struck around 2019 from what we can see, but even speaking in a general sense, there are lots of couples out there, celebrity or not, that have similar approaches where there are highly driven people and busy careers involved.

(A famous example being Dolly Parton's marriage. Tbh I know next to nothing about her and Carl, but she's always heralded as an example in this regard, because her husband is famously uncomfortable with the spotlight and hasn't accompanied her to public events in decades, but she's said that she never minded that because that was always work to her, and what was important was that he supported her in pursuing all her career goals and basically ensured she had a place to call home to return to at the end of the day.)

We're kind of in a brave new world with her current relationship because it felt like, at least at the start, we were maybe watching her figure out her boundaries in real time as to what she was comfortable with or not and adjust accordingly. Like so many have said, I fully believe the extreme privacy thing was initially driven by herself and her experiences in 2016, and she needed that quiet time to recover from all of the things and figure out how to exist in the world again.

Stating the obvious, it seemed like eventually privacy was equated with secrecy, turning the relationship and the celebrity into the elephant in the room and something to never be spoken of to the outside world. People are free to choose whatever works best for themselves and their relationships, and for some the separate public lives might work, but the “kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath” theme is all over her work and it’s clear that it’s a sore spot for her, because she’s been made to feel shame just for the life she leads so many times in the past.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s pretty obvious something Not Great was happening behind the scenes, which didn’t just amount to “she wanted to be a public celebrity and he wanted to be a private hermit.” (Also, in case anyone forgot, this is a person who also chose a public-facing career who also has to engage in press for it, but I digress.) As her career reached new heights post-folklore, if she had the support at home to do all the things without judgment and with encouragement, and in turn offer the same support to her partner, she may have very well lived just fine with that, not unlike Dolly Parton’s case.

By reading between the lines in all the press since, as well as comments on tour and general ~vibes~ with TTPD teasers, it seems like one of the issues was that that was likely not the case. There was all the stuff that we saw — the reticence to acknowledge each other in the media (particularly on one side), the lack of public support even at events at which they were both in attendance for their respective jobs, the great lengths they went to not to be photographed together at events they attended yet no problem taking pictures with other friends and coworkers, the jobs that separated them, the withdrawing from the public even for work accomplishments, etc. Which could all be manageable if a couple chooses to do so together and are not inherently a sign of trouble in themselves.

But what we’re seeing now I think is a reflection of the things we weren’t seeing then, and it seems to indicate some very deep hurt. (I know, call me Captain Obvious.) And like so many have been saying, it feels likely that that part of that hurt is rooted in that very lack of private support where a person would expect it from their partner. Obviously as a Taylor fan blog I’m going to be more inclined to understand her side of a story, but tbh, it’s also because… this is sooooooo common, and something I’ve experienced in my friend group. (@taylortruther is right when she says most breakups are the same one way or another lol.)

One partner is resentful of the other’s success, or resentful that the other’s priorities begin to evolve as new experiences unlock new goals, or feels the other’s ambitions are not worthy of pursuit, and coupled with perhaps their own struggles in the same domain, it’s easy to see where that can chip away at the other partner’s morale and faith in the relationship. I know I’m just speculating here, but I also don’t think it’s totally unfounded. (Again, because a) I’m picking up what she’s putting down and b) it happens to sooooooo many women even among us dull normals.)

With all the pointed mentions about how much Taylor feels supported in her current relationship and how she in turn loves to offer the same show of support to not only her partner but other loved ones, how she’s stepped out more in the last year to a whole host of events, how she’s mentioned feeling like she locked herself away for years and she’s just proud of her partner and happy she can show up for him even if the chaos around it is unsettling, it paints a picture of what perhaps was happening before last year.

To feel like you’re all alone in carrying the weight of the relationship (or burden of it), of twisting yourself into knots to accommodate the other person’s boundaries (or insecurities) but not feeling reciprocity for your own has to be so painful. (The idea that it may have been even darker and to have a partner not only be unreceptive to your own needs but even perhaps resentful/dismissive/belittling of them is even more painful to think of. I guess we’ll find out when TTPD comes out if that was the case, too.)

At a certain point, that lack of acknowledgement will force your hand to be able to reclaim yourself. And it feels like the further removed Taylor in particular is from it, the more she moves from being sad about the life she felt she gave up by leaving, to angry at the life she felt she was giving up by staying. Especially being in a relationship now where it seems like everything comes much easier, where she can be open about the person she’s with and show up for them, all the stuff that seemed as challenging as climbing Mount Everest in her past is nothing more than a molehill at best in her current life.

TL;DR: I don’t think it’s privacy that inherently spells doom for a celebrity relationship like this; it’s the mutual support and respect that does. If Taylor had felt that in the later years of her previous relationship, I think we could be seeing a different, though not necessarily unfulfilled, person right now in 2024, who’d be happy on tour but whose personal life would look a little different. But it seems like by losing that support she lost parts of herself, and we’ve seen her reclaim that in spades in the last year, and perhaps to degrees she didn’t even realize she could from before all the Bad Stuff started happening in her young adulthood.

I know this was extremely long-winded and unnecessary, especially about total strangers we only know through scraps fed through the media, but I just always bristle at this idea that issues like these boil down to “personality differences,” as though one person wants to live in a city and the other on a remote island, or some shit like that. The whole support (and gender tbh) issue is one that’s just very close to my heart because again, I have seen it play out with so many of my friends in long term relationships and marriages and I just think people in relationships (and women in particular in some circles) deserve better than to feel like they’re being, well, tolerated.