#(despite the obvious...issues)

[austenpoppy]

Donna and Dick - two sides of the same coin

"There are two ways to dispel the darkness..."

"To shine a light..."

"I can feel a bright energy in one of you [...] One of you...Donna."

"The pain you bear, that you carry within you. The anger. Release it and let the bright energy within you shine."

"I'm talking about the energy of the soul. 'God''s positive light. Release it, Donna. [...]. Use that light to help you vainquish Eclipso's darkness."

Or to draw the darkness in...

"Nightwing's alone against the dark as it corrupts him and drags him deeper."

"Even though we operated in the dark, it all started with a light. After my parents died, my whole world had gone dark and I felt so lost."

"I must let the darkness in...Take it on myself..."

"[...] So I made a speech to make sure our friends and family knew we'd keep a light out for you. That our hope would burn in the darkness as long as the candles were lit...That your legacy would live on. Those candles made them feel safe, the same way this one did for me when I first took the vow."

"After I put on the cape and cowl for the first time, I was alone in the streets of Gotham against the darkness as it tried to drown me. But that candle was never the light in the dark for me...it was you."

"The heroes didn't need candles and speeches. They only needed the throughline that unites us all. It's why you were able to contain the spread of the darkness within yourself until the infinite earths were restored and Pariah's darkness faded away. Only you could do that."

[cometblaster2070]

oh boy im having thoughts about miquella and malenia again!!!

i don't know if it was intentional or not but like yk seeing malenia's entire character and seeing how the most important thing to her (save for her brother) is her dignity and her pride and her sense of self. after a lifetime of fighting the scarlet rot malenia is someone who still resists it every day no matter how strong it gets because she is someone who will fight to the bitter end to make sure it doesn't overtake her, to make sure that she's still just her and not the vessel for the rot.

(of course, the exception to this is when she bloomed in aeonia and in her fight with us, but I'll call those last-ditch attempts arising out of desperation so)

you get it malenia suffers every day of her life and the rot threatens to consume her but she refuses to let it win and instead completely rejects it and scorns it; she won't let it take away what makes her her.

and contrast it with the dlc where we see her brother miquella do exactly the opposite of what she does. because of his crosses, we see how much of himself miquella has lost how he constantly sheds pieces of himself in his effort to become a god to the point where he even discards his love, his other half st. trina.

he did all this to fulfill his goals, to succeed in what he thought was right; what he thought was a necessary sacrifice that would only bring him closer to his goals of a kind and compassionate world. only the problem is it ended up making him into something he was not; miquella the kind was certainly not like miquella the unalloyed.

i am aware that miquella even in the base game was not the wow sunshine jesusesque figure that did no wrong and was purehearted through and through. even then there were hints to a more complex character, but I think the difference between miquella the kind and miquella the unalloyed is that the miquella of before was someone who cared so so deeply on such a personal level; he was someone who put his heart and soul into helping each and everyone whether it be by crafting prosthetics or needles for his sister to ward away the rot and the meddling of outer gods or whether it was to try to give his brother godwyn a proper death; he was someone who cared very very deeply and in a very personal manner. but afterwards, I think in his quest for godhood miquella became someone very distant, very impersonal in the way a benevolent god who is looking out for everyone and who is "doing the right thing no matter what because ik better and I have the power to fix things" is. he is very removed from that which he once was; he abandoned himself and subsequently abandoned the very ideals he was fighting for.

miquella the kind still wants a world filled with peace and compassion but now, he is a god, now he is someone willing to take the most drastic of measures because now he is no longer the boy that was miquella the unalloyed that believed in an age of compassion with love present. you cannot have compassion without having love which, of course, miquella the kind has abandoned.

i don't know there's just something interesting about these siblings where one has continuously resisted the urge of an outer god who is trying to force her into being something she does not want to be and then there is the one who willingly rips away that which makes him him because he thinks that this will help him become someone he should be; it will help him become the god that will fix this broken world.

[heartbeatbookclub]

I was looking at a few posts about autism (as one does) and it just suddenly clicked into place a fundamental thing about Yuri's character that I'd been grasping at, but hadn't really been able to adequately identify. I still have a much longer and more thorough analysis going through a whole lot of my thoughts on Yuri's character and her experience of autism that i'm working on (of which this will likely be a component), but I thought I'd share this separately just to emphasize.

Post I saw which made this click for me was making fun of the fact that most media depicting impaired empathy in autistic characters explicitly depicts them with this unflappable confidence of never having been rejected by people they love. The crux of this is that in actual reality, autistic people almost always have that experience at some point, for some behavior, for reasons they don't really understand. "There is an invisible line where people will get sick of you, and you have no warning of when you're about to cross it." So frequently, autistic people attempt to ride a razor thin edge, walking on constant eggshells to desperately attempt to avoid crossing that line.

Very often autistic people will attempt to avoid doing anything at all which could be considered weird, or off-putting, and will try their absolute hardest to do things in a way that is acceptable to other people, sometimes to the point of outright suppressing their emotions, because they are afraid that they'll say something just wrong enough that the people they care about will push them away, and they don't understand WHY it happened, but they know it's THEIR fault. Sometimes masking is fighting to appear aloof all the time because you can't regulate your emotions in a way that is acceptable to other people.

And holy fucking Jesus, that fits the exact mold of what I've been trying to talk about with the particular way Yuri's anxieties manifest.

It really feels to me like Yuri has this constant fear of breaking the "rules" of socializing, despite not really understanding what those rules even are. She's constantly afraid of saying something wrong, when she doesn't even know what wrong would be, she's just sure everyone ELSE will know it when they hear it. I think a huge part of her social anxiety comes from her own understanding of herself as a very weird person who doesn't really get a lot of how to socialize, and it seems to me like she's probably dealt with her fair share of social rejection and isolation based on those traits. She then felt she had to take responsibility for those traits, probably because it's the one thing she can change, and she is the one common denominator in all of these bad situations (This is something which is pretty common, actually! "Everyone else can socialize just fine, and I have so much difficulty with it! I must just be broken in some way. I have to try super hard to be normal to make friends!")

I think a big part of why it's so apparent in the Literature Club is because she really thinks she's found a place where she can make friends in spite of all of her issues, so when she starts...being herself, and receives even the smallest HINT of pushback, she overcorrects and tries to rein all of herself in to fix her "mistake", because she really wants to make friends here, and doesn't want them to reject her as well.

She's had this experience of others pushing her away for being weird so often that, coupled with her acknowledged trouble for reading situations, when anybody responds poorly to something and she recognizes it, she immediately overcorrects out of fear of being an annoying burden to everyone around her, and that "correction" consists of suppressing herself into being "normal" (or at least "less weird"), because she believes nobody could actually like her just for being who she is. There's something wrong with her fundamentally, and to make friends, for people to like her and want to be around her, she has to "fix" herself.

it's just, like...

it's really hard for me to interpret Yuri's character that doesn't involve her being somewhere on the spectrum, bros. she's written with such delicately constructed autistic coding, despite the appearance of just being a hackneyed weird girl visual novel trope. she deserves the world.......

[mattpearson]

@pscentral​ event 26: minimalism

SILICON VALLEY (2014 - 2019) TOP 10 RATED EPISODES ON IMDB insp (1, 2)

[daily-hanamura]

[sammygender]

im just thinking abt like. sam (almost) never hits back. only under extreme duress. and i really can't imagine him lashing out at partners either, maybe yelling but never physical. and trying to understand why, like does he actually think he's better than dean by not punching? does he seek therapy at stanford? does he just think he deserves it and feels like he's at the bottom of the totem pole everywhere he goes?

literally makes me feel sick. idk i have a Thing for a teenage sam who is like totally opposed to violence (despite being forced on hunts and into sparring and training and loading guns all the time). there’s that throwaway joke about his idol being gandhi and there’s the fact that obviously sam doesnt Want any of this, this being Hunting and the constant violence that comes with, so i can just see this thing developing where for a brief period hes like sooo holier than thou about it i am better than you and dad cause i read books and i dont solve my problems by hitting things (which tbh he is so right about! <3) but obviously its just his way of coping with the violence that hes been entrenched in since he was six months old. and this is like literally just inside my head. but in my head its true. that was kind of unrelated actually but also not really

and so yeah i think. idk. violence is sooo normal to sam and dean. i think sam doesnt Want to hit back cause its counterproductive and unnecessary and he prefers to talk things through, like that’s just not how he deals with things, what use is hitting back going to do? like then they’d just get into a physical fight. which i dont think he wants. but also 100% even if not consciously i think sam believes he deserves it or at least that its Okay when it happens to him. he literally doesnt even question it. especially like… after s4. i think he tends to just accept deans treatment cause hes got this belief deep down that he’ll always deserve it, and also even if dean isn’t always right he always somehow ends up being right, and….. so awful.

also i do actually think sam went to therapy at stanford but thats just cause i find it fun to think about. like what did he say…. how do you even word the trauma of that upbringing. not sure if he actually took any valuable lessons from it or benefitted from it post short-term.

[ikebanaka]

I don't think enough people appreciate Alastor and Charlie's little walk to Cannibal Town. Charlie is having an emotional venting session with a friend, and Alastor is living out every cashier's worst nightmare of a regular deciding that you want to know all of their business when your shift ended five minutes ago and they still haven't paid. Man is being held hostage by his own agenda. His eye twitches like 5 times in under 10 seconds, and he literally takes his monocle out to polish it because he's Seen Enough

[alicentsgf]

hotd writers heard me calling for their heads and reeled me back in with a daeron mention and a lesbian makeout scene

[dennisboobs]

every day i have to hold my tongue when m-cd-nnis shippers start sounding like frat guys with the way they talk about dennis' Secret Feelings toward mac. hey man. i don't actually think you get it. i don't think you understand what's going on between them.

[pencilofawesomeness]

What is Twisted Wonderland and how would you sell someone on it?

Ohoho. Ohohohoho. Anon. You have activated my trap card >:D

(I'm about to be soooo annoying/unhinged and I'm sorry. I'm not.)

Alright, so:

Twisted Wonderland is a Disney mobile game made in Japan and co-produced by Aniplex. (Yes, that Aniplex.) I'm not here to sell you on the game, so much as the story, but it is a sort of story-book rpg with turned based fights and rhythm games, where you build character units from a gacha pull. As far as gameplay goes, it's very simple, and most of the emphasis lies on the characters and the story. And it's wonderful.

The on-the-box description of this game doesn't do it justice, per se, but that might be because Disney has a little bit of influence on it and they suck at knowing who their target audience is. It is about a high school based on classic Disney villains—but no, not in the way you're thinking, because I once made that mistake too. It is not a villain school. Rather, the world of Twisted Wonderland is its own entity, with characters built as sort of nods or foils to classic Disney characters. The world itself is somewhat built with these films as its past, and history has become so twisted (ha) that modern society views some of these classic villains as the heroes or supporting characters of their stories, and respect them as The Great Seven. (The seven in question being the Queen of Hearts, Scar, Ursula, Jafar, the Evil/Raven Queen, Hades, and Maleficent. None of them are remembered by name, though.)

The game takes place in the modern era, a society with both technology and magic. Specifically, it takes place in a magic high school called Night Raven College, an all-boys dormitory prep school where the only requirement to get in is a magic mirror that peers into your soul and determines whether or not you can a) do magic and b) kin the Great Seven. And, of course, the player character is a regular-ass human who gets isekai'd in and gets stuck with a talking magic cat direbeast named Grim.

Now. That is the general synopsis. I, on the other hand, affectionately call this the Mental Breakdown game.

See, here's the kicker. The magic system is pretty nifty; while it's functions as a standard magic-is-magic sort of soft system, it has ✨consequences✨

Magic has this byproduct called blot. It's this icky stuff that builds up when you a) use too much magic and/or b) are emotionally distressed. But less so in a "I'm panicked right now" sort of way and more so in a "I have chronic depression and/or anxiety" sort of way. And, when a mage is powerful enough, and sad boi enough, and then goes and uses way too much magic and sad boi juice in one sitting, this amazing phenomenon occurs called "overblot"—which is pretty much a super-powered evil form that turns the mage into the darkest form of themselves and then uses magic until they die.

Naturally, this happens in the game. A lot. The formula is pretty much that each "book" of the story, there is an overblot. One for each of the seven dorms, which are based off of the seven villains/the movies they come from. (And "based on" is pretty loose. Yes you can see the similarities, but these are dumb teenage boys with their own hopes and aspirations, and, sometimes, the game completely lies to you about what character they emulate the most. The guy who's Jafar? Well yes but he's actually just a really stressed out Genie stand in. The Hades guy? Whoops that's Meg. Is that a card soldier or the White Rabbit? Doesn't matter, he's got problems.)

The characters are so well written. I could gush about them forever, and they are the driving points of this plot and it means everything to me. They are some of the most traumatized and messed up individuals, but also, they are dumb teenage boys who do dumb teenage boys things. It is all incredibly well balanced and startlingly realistic for a game that amounts to beating the emotional constipation around people. Mostly because it cannot be beat out of them. The blot can, but they have to deal with their emotions with their own two hands, with varying levels of success.

And the shenanigans!!!! Oh, the shenanigans. I call this the Emotional Trauma game but I have once laughed so hard someone heard me through the floor. It's not all doom and gloom for sure. Sometimes you're watching your friend fall apart because his toxic mother instilled debilitating perfectionism and slowly start making enemies of everyone and sometimes you're sending three of the most gremlin students plus one cinnamon roll to infiltrate a gala that a bunch of weather fairies are throwing in the greenhouse because they stole your temperature regulating magestone to be shiny jewelry and you want it to stop snowing inside your dorm room. And sometimes you can have the exact same character who experienced losing his little brother right in front of him gush about a magical girl sledding anime and all of his gacha games. It is the best of both worlds.

And, that's not all! No, no. We get amazing character interactions. Not just pre-determined friend group interactions, but also random interactions. Yana Toboso (the writer/artist) really likes to stick names in a jar sometimes and make them interact and it is the best thing ever. Every single one of these characters I hold in my hands. Every single one of them gets to have their moment to shine. You can emotionally invest in all of them and be rewarded for it.

The game itself is free and pretty easy to get into. There's not really a bad power creep so you can get through it with what you got. Of course the fun part of collecting cards is that there are stories attached to them that you can watch, and those are also sources of joy. (And it's well documented, so you can find things online pretty easily to catch up and see more.)

I just think it's neat. (Read: I accidentally became wholly obsessed with this game and its characters and they are all blorbos to me.)

You should definitely fall into this rabbit hole with me :))) It's so worth it :)))

[cowboylikemorgan]

Oh don’t mind me I’m just thinking about

[tentacleplains]

more scenes that basically everyone sees but pointing out a specific detail i find interesting: "though i hope you don't cause a scene this time" does avery regularly cause scenes at parties?? lmao

[phoenix-before-the-flame]

everyone in the guild has Some kind of burn scar from natsu

Ha yeah I can see it! I think in most cases they dont get any worse that say, minor burns like when you grab a hot pot or something. Everyone's gotten used to it and he's mindful enough now to not let it be super bad burns (versus like when everyone was kids and still learning how to deal)

But most of em's gotten a minor burn from him at least once

[It's headcanon night! Send headcanons]

[aquilamage]

I haven’t been insane about Vi enough lately so time to pour out some random thoughts. free association thinking time:

been thinking about her “It's my savings. I wanna be rich, okay? So I can travel, eat well, buy cool stuff… So no one can say I can't do something!” And none of the following will really be insightful or revelatory because it’s just what she says here but. yeah! that’s vi! the main reason she’s so big on money is because she has to be to get what she wants out of life! it’s what lets her say no to people telling her what to do, and that’s important to her because she has no choice but to be independent and support herself. because no one else will. No one at the Hive had anything positive or supportive to say about her being an explorer until she went out and did it (to a ridiculously successful degree, too. I have to wonder if/how it might’ve differed if she was on a regular accomplishment level team. not the one leading them all to the mission to the Hive). she never had a choice not to be. I could also see that being a little part of why she starts out not really being a teamwork person. past experiences have taught her she can’t rely on anyone else for support. (does make me wonder about what if she’d met Chubee before leaving the Hive. obviously she still would’ve left, but how might even a bit of support have changed other things?)

I feel like we don’t talk about the fact that The Beemerang Is Also Knives enough

ok so at one point there was this post talking about people with money and how it affects their life like. if you can afford to get a nanny then you can only do the fun parts of childcare and when you stop feeling like taking care of the kid you can just hand them to someone else to take them away. and again likely not especially revelatory but I would guess that’s the kind of way queen bianca handled the bees as her daughters (she does care about them. absolutely. but not in the same hands-on attached way as we usually associate with parents) and thinking about how that kind of treatment would then apply to vi....hm

in universes where discussions of Gender and Pronouns etc happen I think she has moments where she gets frustrated with the everything of Being Referred To and Having Complicated Identity She Hasn’t Quite Figured Yet and is like. gender is cancelled how dare you refer to me. but especially anyone else calls me a girl ever i will be stabbing them

also I think a lot about what circumstances she finds out about gayness/Gender being things. and whether she’s thought about it in herself before and whether she’d been dismissed on it/told it wasn’t a thing etc. most circumstances she ends up angry about the finding out times because of (un)consicious internal conflict stuff

underground tavern stuff implies she was definitely doing quests and stuff for money with them precanon. would kill to know what specifically it was. but also the first talk with utter implies that she was doing stuff off that questboard as well which is even more intriguing. utter’s spy also implies you don’t have to be an explorer to do them but otherwise you would think you did I feel. so again very curious what was up there

[lavenderjewels]

my only general predictions for jjk is that Yuuji will be able to target the different souls in Sukuna’s body to be able to reach Megumi’s suppressed soul and attack sukuna’s. Im actually interested in how this will all go down, especially with Higuruma in the mix, since these fights can’t be as simple as two overpowered characters with the loss of multiple special grade sorcerers. With the potential of a court trial domain or Yuuji’s knowledge of the soul, I imagine it’ll become more psychological or metaphysical in the fighting, with a lot of good insight into sukuna and/or yuuji, megumi, etc. As for Kenjaku, I have NO idea where their story is going (apart from Yuuta wanting to kill them), but i enjoy that part of the story being unpredictable—it fits their character

[coulsonlives]

I just had to share this video because holy shit, it hits the nail right on the head! So well spoken. This stuff needs to be circulated more, esp with the growing number of people thinking they have this because of misinformation, or just outright faking it.