#(like it's findable but i just don't like to volunteer it)

[not-poignant]

Just saw your post about Ghibli + elements of grotesque with the Nausicaa gifset and how you wrote an essay comparing it to Shinto philosophy and I had to ask - you didn't happen to write that for an IB film class did you?? Cause that would be a WILD coincidence if so, bc I'm doing IB film rn and one of our extended essay examples was literally exactly that; an analysis/comparison of Ghibli movies and Shinto philosophy/religion and it was really really good.

Even if not, that's so cool!! I adore Ghibli and totally agree with the points you left in the tags of that post. Ghibli is about confronting the uncomfortable and ugly and grotesque and scary and acknowledging it as a valid and necessary part of life. Everything in balance!! Sure there are some more cutesy kiddy films which I feel have become more mainstream but especially films like Nausicaa have very real and important messages that often get overlooked :( I was really scared of Nausicaa when I was a child and now it's one of my favourite films!!

Anyway, you're awesome, I agree with your takes and Ghibli rocks 💪

Hi anon!

So this is going to be a wild journey, strap in.

I don't know what IB Film is. I did my thesis in a final year university unit specifically where we all developed our own thesis subject, had a supervisor, and it was basically a test run to do first class Honours (which lets you bypass a Masters degree and go straight to the PhD, which I then intended to do). It was a limited class that only had about 10 people in it, I believe. My supervisor was the head of the film department.

Now, this was back in about 2004. Shit I'm old. Ghibli wasn't a household name. It wasn't streaming anywhere. You couldn't get DVDs easily, and if you wanted them you had to make sure you had a region unlocked DVD player to deal with the DRM and then buy them from overseas. Most people were only getting exposed to these films if they were regular cinema-goers, or if they were an aggressive pirate via downloading torrents (which I was). The only place you could get Ghibli merch pretty much was Japan. It absolutely did not have the kind of traction it has now, no one could do a class on it outside of Japan because the majority of students would have no idea what you were talking about.

I think Disney/Lasseter had picked up the option to do dubs, but for the most part, if we were seeing these at the cinema, they were subbed.

So that's the context! That was in an era where I was the one directly getting all of my friends on Livejournal and in person, into Studio Ghibli. I went to the Ghibli film festival back before Spirited Away came out, and that got me hooked years previous.

In 2004 I did my thesis. At the time I was the only person in the English speaking world to do a thesis specifically on my thesis subject. It had been covered briefly in sentences like 'Miyazaki practices Shinto' etc. and there was one other unpublished thesis I was able to find that talked about concepts of Shinto and some of Miyazaki's films which helped me a lot with my thesis.

I went on a deep dive into Shinto. Because it was a thesis, I had to research a lot into the difference between folk and shrine Shinto (Ghibli films lean very 'folk' but there are moments of shrine Shinto), and ended up with a pretty baller reference list. But many, many, many more resources online and off have come out since. I'd find the thesis very easy to do if I was doing it now.

Because I was the first to kind of present my findings in a thesis like this, the thesis ended up getting published in a book on animism and then journeyed further on because it was of interest to people who are interested in representations of animism in mass media, especially popular mass media.

The specific focus of my thesis statement was the difference between the black and white puritanical morality of Disney, the most popular animation studio for children and adults at the time, versus Miyazaki's mixed morality and more nuanced explorations of good and evil, villains, heroes and antiheroes in Ghibli animations, and how that was at least partly founded in the difference between a more Christianised versus Shinto mindset in relation to nature and intersections with humanity.

Idk, something like that.

The thesis did well! I got my high distinction, got my invitation into first class Honours, and then was too sick to go on and get the PhD and teach about these things, which was what I fully intended to do!

My thesis got some traction over the years, published in a few places both online and in at least two books (one that I own, the other I forget because it's been oh my god like 20 years), so the idea got around!

Anon, there is actually a chance - a small chance - that the only reason you're getting this essay subject in a more standardised curriculum is because my thesis made its way into the public eye 20 years ago and got quite popular. It was never peer reviewed or anything, it wasn't a PhD thesis and didn't need to be, it was mostly just a very well-researched (if I do say so myself) collation of thoughts on the subject as someone is also a practicing animist. In retrospect I really wish I'd incorporated more of Zipe's teachings but he was in a completely different field to media studies and my supervisor didn't know about him to suggest him.

Discussions of Ghibli, Miyazaki and Shinto became a lot more popularised as Ghibli got more popular and people in the western world discovered that there were already a published essay (at the time people could read it without paying for it as I'd put it up online for folks to access) that linked to other sources and the unpublished essay I'd found. So...

Um, yeah, that's wild, because I know that this wasn't a thing in universities 20 years ago, because I was so desperate for resources I was emailing around and asking universities so I didn't have to figure so much out myself. 😅

[drdemonprince]

I am feeling very conflicted because I want to do more activism but I live in a very isolated area, and the one organization that works here that I even remotely align with politically has had some issues with the people it's supposed to serve (immigrants in this case) complaining that it doesn't provide many services needed and some people in it are dicks. Also, the options they have to collaborate are very much not autistic friendly. At the same time, I hate the thought of sitting back and doing nothing -beyond what I already do, which is limited to people I know- because the option to do something is not perfect. What would you recommend?

It sounds as though the organization you are looking at is a nonprofit that provides social services. I would not consider working with such an organization to be activism, usually. They will present volunteering your time with them as "activism," but it's really just free labor, somewhere on the spectrum between being charitable with your time and labor exploitation.

There is very little that most nonprofits do to advance any kind of social or political change of any kind. For the most part, nonprofits function to maintain their own operations, with a side hustle of dispensing very limited resources to marginalized people who will remain just as marginalized afterward.

More on this:

If you'd like to be involved more in your community in a way that feels meaningful and that works with your disability, I would encourage you to think far more broadly than merely joining an existing easily-findable organization. That kind of search will tend to skew toward liberal, nonprofit-led, politically toothless efforts. Instead, think of what you can do to make greater contact with the people in your area who are marginalized and share struggles with you.

Can you give homeless people meals in the park and ask them how they're doing? Can you get involved in your local parks or nature reserves? (there if you're volunteering your time, at least it can be for something enriching and beneficial). Is there a local Food Not Bombs chapter? A local Muslim community center that could use safety marshalls? A local abortion clinic that could use the same? Do you have neighbors who are single parents and need childcare help? Dogsitting? Does the senior down the street need their lawn mowed?

Is there a local Facebook group where you can offer help to people in your community in need? Start saying hello to people. Asking them about their day. Asking about what's going on in the neighborhood. What needs done, who needs help, what problems are plaguing the area that nobody is doing anything about? Are there any local businesses that are discriminatory and need to be taken to account publicly? Are there forests you can help protect from deforestation with tree spiking? Is there a jail near you where you can provide jail support, handing out food and clothes and water and letting released prisoners make phone calls?

Some of this stuff might not seem like activism in the most obvious, in-your-face, picket-signs-and-banners-in-the-streets sense. But it's a lot more impactful than a lot of that is on its own. It's community building. I'd also recommend reading some stuff on the Anarchist Library website about building one's own affinity groups. You don't need a big formal organization to make a difference -- in fact, for many structural and economic reasons, it can be harder to make a difference within a large group that faces public exposure and the risk of legal censure. A few new homies in your town who care as much as you do can do a whole lot of good.

Some reading:

[slushiebonez]

damn they killed me from ur inbox...

dexter 0,6,8

Frfr top ten tumblr moments ever. Anyways HAHAHAH YES A CHANCE TO TALK ABT MY GUY (also sorry I took so long I had to go to a volunteer event)

0. - The first thing I think of when I see the character

Honestly? @/dexter-erotoph's art is a quick popup for me. I found his account when I first got into Spooky Month and it definitley helped enhance my initial levels of Dexter mania into the frothing torrent it is today. Seeing the Dexter Paws[TM] post in an urgent care clinic is still a core memory lol (Odie if you see this you rock dude :3). Otherwise I think abt how cute he is (lol), how tragic he is, and Warrior Cats in descending order. Something something murder cat connection idk man I connect everything to Warriors in my brain lol. OH and ratcandy bc im still obsessed with it

6. - A theory about them I think is unlikely

Hmmmmmmmmm this one takes a little thinkin, mainly bc people don't usually make alot of theories related to Dex lol. I guess I'd have to say the Dexter Velseb theory, I love the theory / concept so much and worm it into my ideas often, but in terms of "things that are actually likely to be canon" I feel like the Dexter Velseb theory is pretty low down. Won't stop me though

8. - A sad / evil HC for them

:DDDDDDDDDDDDDDD YIPPPEEE I have. A lot lmao. A few of them like off the top of my head

- Before Unwanted Guest happened he was a dude who actually liked kids alot, but after everything he can't stand them

- This is a little niche, I like to think he got his scratch from his first ever kill, a neighborhood cat. It jacked up his eye bc he was messing with it, and later on the cat came to "apologize" to the boy but Dexter's needs had begun to become more intense around that time and it was messing with him enough that when he saw a small warm body to overpower he just kinda went for it without thinking much. He buried the cat somewhere in the woods and everyone just thought it was missing, meaning a bunch of missing pet posters that kinda haunted lil Dexter for a while. And then Dexter would end up on the missing posters himself, with people thinking he was still findable.

- My man did not have a good home life!!! Especially because I like to toy with the whole Dexter Velseb theory, I don't think Bob would be the most nurturing or even-tempered parent. I also like to think its one of the reasons Dexter's needs are such a big issue for him, Bob saw a little boy with psychological issues and instead of taking him to see someone he totally fed into and encouraged them

- Dexter is still sort of tethered to his body, he can't re-enter it because Moloch refuses to let him in but because of his death and the state of his body Dexter can't really pass on and keeps coming back to it. Imagine staring down at your own mangled body flopped on a morgue table watching a lady try to pull the teeth out of your head because she's made a sort of pet project out of your brutal death. And your own eyes are staring back at you with loathing.

- Speaking of body, Moloch taking his body hurt. REAL bad. I mean, he had extended hardened claws, teeth piercing through his mask, horns.... that definitely wasn't an easy transformation. I don't think Dexter got kicked from the body right away and could feel Moloch stealing his body and beginning to destroy it. I can't remember who made it but I remember seeing art of Dexter post-mortem where because the mask stayed on during his body reshaping it messed up his face real bad, imagine feeling your bones and muscles reformat but your head is basically stuck in a bit ziploc bag. Dexter got kicked out of the body pretty fast but the sensation sticks with him, and watching the transformation finish from the sidelines probably wasn't a good feeling

- This is a little more AU-ish but if Dexter got his body back I think it would be almost worse, I can't imagine being forced to live again post-mortem for the 3rd time would be pleasant mentally, and also his body is now ruined enough that it's impossible for him to return to his old life. Not just in an appearance way but probably internally too, a body somewhere between life and death is probably a bit rusty on the insides. So he's kinda stuck, bc he can't really get a new body and his old body isn't worth it anymore, but he can't let go of it

I like to bully Dexter alot as a form of endearment lol, but I'll cut a little bit of the bitter with something sweet - I like to think the cat in his missing photo is his pet cat, her name is Sasha and she helps that loser man calm down :3 I also like to think he collects taxidermy and tries to make it himself, some of it is a little botched tho lol

Anyways, thank you for asking!!! (And indulging me w/ talking abt Dexter lmao)