#-something bad that fundamentally 'needed' to end

[sallykie]

I've decided. I don't like the HTTYD movie sequels' xenophobia era. I don't think the themes should have gone that way.

[ratkingsystem]

i dont even mean this in a catchy, buzzword way but i really do think autistics trigger the fuck out of people with NPD. it keeps being a pattern in a VERY specific type of person in my work life. a lot of ppl w NPD have a very paranoiac sense of "everyone is trying to get me and tear me down" thing that comes w the grandiosity. not just 'wow i am great' but 'i will achieve greatness and i HAVE to and it won't be okay if i don't' and the fundamental belief that people 'lower' on the social hierarchy are secretly envious and making up ways to fuck you over and take what you have (yknow, bc Everything Is About You). being allistic on top of that - assuming your experience is default and everyone knows these minor social tics & anyone who doesn't respond in kind is being minorly petty at the very least - and you have someone for whom every little autistic social mishap is triggering the "secretly hates me is out to get me is trying to signal to me that i am cringe" alarms. i will play my tiny violin here and say if they see you as hot or conventionally attractive, they WILL NOT assume you are weird or neurodivergent, not in a billion years, they ONE BILLION PERCENT WILL ASSUME it's obvious that you are trying to signal you think you're better than them. it's really sad and it's a really stressful way to live but it helped me to understand WHY this dynamic was happening

[nopeferatu]

everyones opinions are valid unless they not positive towards the things i love. in those instances, theyre WRONG

[mauxanhduong]

been thinking and i think part of the disconnect and frustration i had with gomens 2 stems from the fact that book aziraphale is very different from tv aziraphale. which is a whole other thing but i think considering that makes more sense than being like why the fuck would he do that. like by the end of s1 i’d assumed tv aziraphale had ended up where book aziraphale had with his view on heaven. but from what i’m getting he’s on his own more extended arc? to which i’m like. oh i guess we haven’t sorted it out yet but makes for some interesting thoughts about religious trauma. but that’s a different guy than i thought we were dealing with you know?

[poisonjaffas]

I literally hate how some days I just seem to wake up woth zero patience or tolerance for other people and I'm just awful to be around and I don't even notice half the time, I don't want to make my friends sad but that seems to happen the more time I spend with them and I don't know how to explain it in a way that doesn't just make me sound like a dick for no reason

[teaboot]

I seriously hope you can job hop to something else cause you're not chaotic neutral man.

You're still a white Canadian whose actions and job help more the megacorps keep the status quo.

I really looked up to you but that's on me.

And yeah, I know security, cop shit and military pay good money but at the cost of my people? Fuck no.

Listen. I feel you. But there's a lot of cold, power-tripping bastards in this line of work and if I stick where I am then they don't get to have that.

I'm not a cop. I am not beholden to the justice system. Sometimes I get contracted out to people who say shit like "addicts should be put down, if you see any crackheads drag them out" and I nod and say "yes sir", and then I take their money and use it to buy those people coffee and a sandwich and tell 'em when free lunch days are at the church.

Boss sees me walking with someone and thinks I'm kicking them out, gives my boss great reviews. I'm having a great conversation with Connie, who used to by a stylist and wound up on the street after an accident that left her with chronic pain and a heroin addiction. Connie learns that there's a gap between two property lines nearby where technically nobody can call to have her removed.

There's a really sweet guy in town who's normally very nice, but sometimes flies into paranoid rage and yells slurs at people. Sometimes he forgets he's been banned from places and wanders in looking for a wife he hasn't had for nine years. Owner sends me to kick him out, and I ask "hey Mike, how are you?" And see where we are today.

One time there was a guy whose abusive ex kept following him to work, and I got to walk him to his car at the end of every day to make sure she couldn't get him alone.

Another person had a stalker who kept asking receptionists when she was gonna be there, when she was supposed to leave, if she was in today. I'd keep record of every time he came in, every time someone saw him, every time he violated his restraining order or damaged her things.

And when I wonder if I'm actually helping or not, or if I'm part of the greater problem, I remember that other people who work with me call homeless people wildlife and talk about how bad they wanna get an excuse to fight someone and I remember that I'm the one who knows where the blind spots on the cameras are, and thank God it's not him.

My position is fundamentally different from that of the military or law enforcement. I don't *need* to be buddy-buddy with most of these dickheads- I don't *need* to send people into the justice system.

I do single-person foot patrol. Nobody cares how I get the job done. They say, "Hey, faceless goon number three- make that bastard disappear" and I say "on it, boss" and give him tickets to disney world.

I once asked another guard if he knew that one of our regulars used to be an airplane technician. He said, "No, I don't talk to them". Blanket "Them". "Them" as in street people. "Them" as in addicts, or shoplifters, or ex-cons, or sex workers.

I asked why, and he told me, "it's easier if you don't think of them as people."

Anyhow, now I get calls to "watch that sketchy lady who just came in" and I say, "yes, sir" and leave her the fuck alone, 'cause that's Jolene, and people always think she's on drugs and aggressive but she's just deaf in one ear and slurs cause she has brain damage, you dickhead

so yeah, don't worry, I've spent a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of my vocation, and I still think I'd rather be in charge of my locations than someone like Darryl, who dreams of "cuffing a perp" and drives a car with Punisher decals on the hood

Also it's minimum wage but that's kinda tangential

[joy-haver]

there isn't a "kill all the ____" that will fix the problems of the world, because, 1. you probably can't. 2. if you did, more of them would probably come into existence, or 3. other people would come to fit the same social position. 4. There isn't a group of Fundamentally Bad Evil People that Cause All The Problems, because 5. Harm isn't caused by a type of person. everyone causes harm and an effective system of addressing harm has to contend with that. 6. you will end up expanding the definition of ____ to include whoever else you want to kill anyway. which will suck. 7. Destruction without building will leave nothing behind. New harms will arise. Old harms will continue. Because there is nothing to replace them. There is nothing Helpful being done. a better world isn't created by just getting rid of all the bad stuff and calling it a day. you have to actually make something that meets peoples needs. 8. structures of power and harm sometimes maintain themselves even if no one intends them to or purposefully wants them to. 9. systems of power will end up finding a scapegoat. they will convince you that some marginalized group are the real ____ and you should focus on them. and in your zeal and blood thirst you, or at least some of your allies, will fall for it. And you will commit atrocities. 10. The world that is created can only come from the world that is. And look, whatever group you are thinking of -- yes I mean them too. Pedophiles, rapists, murderers, sociopaths, nazis, billionaires, cops, you name it. Harm and oppression is far too complicated to ever be solved with Finding The Right Group To Kill. And there are lots of really great arguments to be made about why eliminationist rhetoric is ethically bad, or historically questionable, etc. I am open to that being added on and talked about too. But my point is that It Will Not Accomplish Your Desired Results. You Will Have Committed Atrocities and You Will Have Failed At Achieving Your Initial Goal.

[kashverse]

umbrellas are, without a doubt, mankind’s magnum opus. rain? blocked. sun? deflected. want to look like a brooding protagonist in a slow-motion film sequence? pop that thing open and stride dramatically.  a/n: read till the end to see choso's temu collab <3

unfortunately, this universal truth is lost on gojo, who believes his infinity is a catch-all solution to every problem in life, including weather. does it keep the rain off him? sure. does it do the same for you? absolutely not. but does he realize this? of course not. so while he’s smugly holding you close, humming some dumb love song and talking about how "this is just like those k-dramas, huh, babe?" you are actively getting drenched. fast forward two days later—you’re curled up in bed, tissues piling up like a battlefield, and gojo is wailing as if he’s the one on death’s doorstep. “my baby is dying,” he cries to shoko over the phone, who is ignoring him as she eats her lunch. it doesn’t matter that you told him it was just a mild cold. gojo is now hand-feeding you soup with the solemnity of a man who thinks he is on his last day of service. *“i should’ve—sniff—bought an umbrella.” you have half a mind to hit him with the spoon.

geto, on the other hand, is a man of preparation and, for some reason, exclusively stocks clear umbrellas. like, exclusively. open his closet and you will find nothing but a neat, borderline concerning collection of transparent umbrellas, stacked like they’re waiting for a government-distributed evacuation plan. does he use them all? yes. does he need that many? no. when you question him, he simply shrugs and says, “it’s aesthetic.” but the aestheticism fades a little when the two of you are forced to walk under the blazing summer sun, grumbling like old men because the clear plastic is offering exactly zero protection from UV rays. "we’re gonna get so tanned,” you whine. “we’ll be fine,” he reassures, though he looks about one minute away from passing out. why doesn’t he just buy a regular umbrella? you may never know.

toji, meanwhile, gives you the slow blink of a man who has never voluntarily used an umbrella in his life. if you ask him where his umbrella is, he will blink at you like a lizard sunning itself on a rock and say, "what’s an umbrella?" except he’s joking, but also not really. the thing about toji is that he fundamentally does not care about the weather. if it rains, it rains. if it shines, it shines. he has completed jobs in typhoons, sprinted through downpours to reach you in the middle of the night when you were anxious, and once walked through a literal snowstorm to buy a six-pack. weather is an inconvenience only for the weak. that is until his philosophy backfires and he ends up with a sunburn so severe he’s walking around the house hissing like a vampire, or with a cold so bad that every time he blows his nose, he sounds like a goose fighting for its life. and now he’s grumpy about it. "should’ve used an umbrella," you tell him sweetly as you rub aloe on his peeling shoulders. he grumbles something unintelligible and sulks like a big, overgrown toddler.

nanami is the only one among them who has fully mastered the art of umbrella ownership. you don’t even have to ask if he has one; the answer is always yes. he has one for every occasion. he carries a primary umbrella, a backup umbrella in his bag, and if you check his office drawer, there’s probably another one neatly folded away just in case. he whips it out at the farmers' market, during evening strolls, and most impressively, in a street fight. if you’ve ever seen a man turn an umbrella into a lethal weapon, nanami is that man. he can and will beat the shit out of someone with it. “it’s a tool,” he says simply. and honestly, who are you to argue?

choso, however, is firmly in the raincoat camp. umbrellas make his hands hurt, so he skips the struggle entirely and commits to full rain protection like a man on a mission. the problem arises when he starts browsing for new raincoats and sees children wearing character-themed ones. next thing you know, he is holding up two sanrio-themed raincoats from temu, grinning ear to ear. "they glow in the dark when they get wet," he says proudly. they allegedly glow. allegedly. you do a quick google search and find out they might actually contain enough lead to take down a fully grown man. "choso, you are not wearing that." but he already bought it. and now he’s standing in the rain, in a kuromi-themed raincoat that is possibly a biohazard, smiling like he’s the peak of fashion.

sukuna, much like toji, does not give a single damn about rain or shine. it could be pouring or blisteringly hot, and he’d still be doing whatever he wants, unaffected and unbothered. however, if the weather starts personally inconveniencing him—like preventing him from stretching out in his favorite sunspot like some oversized demon cat—he will glare at the sky itself and, somehow, it will fix itself. it doesn’t rain if sukuna doesn’t want it to. the sun won’t shine if he says so. when you ask him how he does it, he just shrugs. "i just do." you don’t push for answers. you’re a little scared to.

[samkerrworshipper]

lights are on, but nobody’s home

barca femeni x reader

it’s unedited. i’m not sorry about it, if it puts u off then soz icbf. this fic has been in my drafts since october so it was about time i finished it! combined to fics lol to get it done and its a fast paced very vague mess but have fun :) loved the idea not the execution!

warnings: kinda angsty?

Red cards exist in the game for a reason. You don’t deny that. Red cards are needed to keep people safe, to set a boundary between safe and unsafe play. But there had been something so undeniably unfair about yours.

You’d hurt somebody, you weren’t going to lie about that. It had been unintentional, but a risk you’d taken had ended up with the world’s best player being stretchered off the pitch, and for just that, you deserved a yellow. But a red, for a tackle that was mostly legal, seemed ridiculous. Tackles happened. As a defensive midfielder, it was your job to get the ball off attackers, it was your responsibility to make sure that you stopped the ball from being kicked in the direction of your keeper or down the field to another player. It was what cemented your spot in the English midfield; you weren’t just a good attacker; you were ferocious in defence. You averaged at least 5 tackles per game; it was the most crucial part of your game; it was fundamentally what made you a good footballer.

Arguing with the ref and using some particularly vulgar language definitely didn’t help your case but in your defence it hadn’t been a red cardable offence. It was all pointless though, the card had already been raised and pointed in your direction, you’d been booked, in a friendly of all games.

It was bad, you’d know that from the moment your cleats had stepped over the line, the incessant booing being directed towards you as you walked past Sarina the grim frown etched into the details of her face was enough of a sign. You were in a bad situation, but you’d just put your team in an even worse situation with a one less player on the field to continue the fight in the world cup final rematch. It wasn’t good, it was your job to make sure that your team was in the best situation to achieve success on the pitch and you’d jeopardised that. What you hadn’t realised was that action wasn’t only jeopardising your team, it was jeopardising you as a whole.

It had begun from the moment you’d gotten back to your hotel room later that night. Your teammates had focused all of their energy on trying to lift your spirits, with the game ending in a 1-1 draw, everyone was happy. The England team was your second family, and considering you didn’t play in the WSL like the vast majority of them, national team time was valuable to you. You sat next to Beth on the ride back to the hotel, happy to listen to her non-stop talking as a distraction for the disappointment that had settled inside of you. At team dinner, you sat sandwiched in between Grace and Ella; most dinners spent on your normal table, you struggled to get a word in, but it was the constant surrounding buzz that kept you out of your head and specifically off of your phone, and you were more grateful than usual that you had that. By the time you’d even made it to your room and gone through your nighttime routine, you still hadn’t checked your phone. It was only as you began to prepare yourself to get into bed that you headed towards your bag to fish it out. You climbed into bed, finally opening your phone for the first time, and instead of it having a handful of messages from your family and a sprinkle of Instagram notifications, there were thousands. Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, newsforums, both English and Spanish; as you scrolled down the list, it only got bigger. All of it was the same, about how you’d ‘intentionally’ injured your own club teammate to benefit your national team, how you were malicious, how you had played beyond the line of safe play, how you deserved to be penalised, how you had ruined sportsmanship. It was never-ending, and the more that you read, the worse it got. You felt like a shell of yourself as your eyes scanned the different words; you completely dissociated it all. It felt like you were reading about somebody else, like there was absolutely no possibility that the sentences you were absorbing could possibly be about you. There was so much falsity behind all of it that it was hard to understand it. You’d played the same you always did, you hadn’t played dangerously, you’d played within the rules as you always did. Beyond that, you’d visited Aitana in the change rooms after the game, desperate to apologise and make sure that you hadn’t done any damage or hurt her in any way. Your play hadn’t been malicious, there hadn’t been any ill intention or hatred fueled behind it, even though every single article or post was making it seem that way. Aitana had come off after the clash purely as a caution, when you’d gone to see her, all she was dealing with was a little bit of inflammation. By the time you were both back in Barcelona, she’d be as good as new. Even after watching the replays, it was clear to anybody with eyes that all you were doing was fighting for the ball, the same as every other 1-on-1 battle throughout the game. Yet as soon as a spotlighted player got injured, it was suddenly a different story being told.

Normally you would shake it off, in general, you were the kind of person who didn’t get bothered by much, You were a bubbly and happy person, you were the kind of teammate who was always smiling and trying to make other people laugh. Usually, if you had a teammate who was in the same situation as you were now, you would be the one picking them up and trying to help them shake off all of this. It wasn’t normally a struggle for you to overcome a little bit of hate, but there was something so shattering about this. Whilst you still believed deep down that you’d done nothing wrong, it was hard to convince yourself of that when there were so many people who were telling you otherwise.

You weren’t the kind of person who regularly fell into the mind numbing action of doom scrolling, you weren’t big on social media in general, it was something you had to do because of your job but not much else beyond that. Yet right now it felt impossible to deviate away from it, every time you saw your name pop up again somewhere you were drawn to another dark place of the internet where you kept reading until you were mentioned or tagged in another post and your phone lit up with a new piece of media.

It was never ending, it just kept coming, and the longer you indulged in it, the sicker you started to feel. Had you done something wrong? Were you truly as malicious as everyone wrote? Were you the bad person they were painting you to be?

It was impossible to not consider that potentially everyone else was right, maybe you were the problem.

It was a good day to be roomed with Lucy, she’d been in bed before you’d even made it up to the room and asleep whilst you’d been showering. If the sounds of snoring were anything to go off of then she was long gone, which made you feel more secure as you muffled a sob into your pillow. It was going to be fine, by the time morning rolled around it would be forgotten. Or at least that was what you thought.

The convenience of playing your games in Spain was that unlike majority of your teammates, you were able to sleep in the following morning instead of flying back to their club teams. Lucy was gone long before you woke up, something you were specifically grateful for because whilst Lucy was mostly oblivious, you weren’t sure if you would have been able to hide your red eyes and puffy face. You hadn’t had much sleep, but even in the few hours that you had managed to get, the notifiations on your phone had only multiplied significantly. Every second your phone lit up again, and for the sake of your own brain you chose to switch it off completely. If you stayed in the shower a little longer because you got so lost thinking about it all that your feet started to go numb from the water pressure there was nobody around to say anything about it. If you happened to space out halfway through your skincare and accidentally spill half of your serum down the sink it was nothing a bit of water from the sink couldn’t fix. Every time you thought you’d forgotten about it all, like you’d drifted away from everything you’d read and then suddenly it all came back to you like some sick fever dream. It was the same words that kept circulating, and every time it came back to you it was impossible to just let it go.

You were half way dressed when your door was knocked on. It was what woke you up to the fact that you had absolutely no idea what time it was or how long you’d spent spaced out and in your brain.

You weren’t shocked to find Keira waiting outside your door, looking significantly more put together then you were.

“Mate, I’ve texted you about 30 times. The taxis here to take us to the airport.”

Fuck. You’d forgotten that you were taking a group taxi instead of leaving the hotel individually.

“Give me five minutes, I slept in and forgot to pack up last night.”

Keira cut you off before you continued your ramble of excuses.

“I’ll help you pack up, you focus on getting dressed and sorting yourself out, okay?”

Keira wasn’t your closest friend, she was one of the few people on the Barcelona team that spoke fluent english which grouped the two of you together. She was also one of your idols coming through as the youngest midfielder in the English and Barcelona squad. But personality wise the two of you didn’t jell, you were too energetic and a little bit too immature to buddy up with her. It didn’t change the fact that she was basically an older sister to you. She wasn’t exactly the person you’d go to for relationship advice or confess your troubling thoughts to. But she was the person you could rely on to help you in any situation without asking questions, and this really was an extension of that.

Keira made quick work of packing up your things from around your room whilst you finished getting dressed and putting your hair in a messy bun.

By the time you’d made yourself look just enough presentable for the public eye Keira was done, all of your bags piled together at your hotel room door.

“I found your phone at the bottom of your bag, looks like you might want to charge it before the drive.”

Right now, your phone felt like a block of dynamite, balancing in Keira’s hand, ready to explode at any second.

“No, I just turned it off.”

You didn’t really think about how odd your words could sound until they’d left your mouth, and Keira’s eyebrows were raising quickly.

“You just turned it off?”

It’s an unusual behaviour for you, one that Keira has clearly picked up on by the tone in her voice. Your phone is practically an extension of you, the team didn’t joke about you having square eyes for nothing. Always getting people to film tiktoks or do stupid challenges.

“Yes?”

You actively observe all of the cogs in Keira’s brain turning, she looks like she has a lot to say, but then she glances down at her watch and it’s clear that the fact that you are running well behind time takes priority.

“Let’s go, the taxi is waiting.”

Keira practically pushed you out of the hotel room, all of your bags in her hands and ushering you straight towards the elevator.

As she’d said, the taxi is waiting in front of the lobby, the driver looks particularly ticked off as he waits outside the drivers side door, his foot tapping and a cigarette hanging halfway out of his mouth. Keira loads your suitcase into the boot of the car whilst you take your backpack off of her and hop into the back of the car, Keira follows and sits down across from you.

The first five minutes of the ride are silent, Keira flicks through her phone whilst you stare out the tinted window and pretend that you can see the things passing by.

“You can talk to me you know? I know we’re not exactly the closest, but I’m here for you.”

You don’t bother to look in Keira’s direction, you keep your eyes and facial expression schooled and focused on the window.

“Anything the media writes is bullshit, you ought to just ignore it.”

You wished you could have ignored it last night, when theoretically you were at your most vulnerable. Maybe if you hadn’t of read so much when you were already in a bad mindset it wouldn’t have imprinted so much, regardless it has and you can’t just ignore it.

“Kei, I’m fine. When have I ever cared what the papers write about me?”

Now, right now is when you care. It’s a fair statement though, you’ve never been affected when tabloids have written far worse things about you, when you came out and for months there was homophobic slander everywhere you looked. In the past it hadn’t been based off of facts, it had all been fictitious. But now that there is just a inkling of truth behind what’s being written it feels far more real and you aren’t sure how to get past that.

“I’m just saying that there isn’t anything wrong with being affected by it. Especially after last night, there’s nothing wrong with admitting that.”

This is the trouble between you and Keira, she’s a lot more frank. In your opinion it’s a thing that comes with age, whilst she’s very happy to admit when she’s going through a hard time you’d rather cover it up with jokes and pretend that it doesn’t actually bother you. The trouble with your approach is that it only works for so long before people start to see you fraying at the edges or you completely break down from the pressure.

“Just mad I hurt your bestfriend, huh?”

The only response you get from Keira is a loud exhale, the same a mother would when her child makes a immature joke at a immature time. Immaturity is your coping mechanism, because by default people tend to be put off by it, they naturally gravitate away from it. Furthermore they gravitate away from whatever conversation or confrontation they were going to have.

“I’m not mad, I’m concerned for you and how something like this can affect a persons career.”

It’s too many feelings, to much concern, too much. You don’t deserve it and you definitely do not want it.

“I’m fine, we play football, it’s part of it all.”

You still haven’t looked at Keira but you could make an educated guess and assume that she looks deflated. It’s another reason that out of Keira and Lucy you’d always gotten along better with Lucy, you didn’t care to admit it but she knew how to get to the bottom of all of your weird cues and knew what was right and wrong to say. Keira’s too smart for her own good, and it doesn’t work on you, it never has. She’s all you have at Barca now though, besides Roebs, whose been too focused on her rehab and getting back on the pitch to be much of a friend.

“Hate shouldn’t be part of it. If you need to talk about the fact that some part of it is clearly bothering you then I’m here, anybody else on the team is here. Okay?”

You nod purely for the sake of ending the conversation, you can’ even figure out how you feel about it all, let alone trying to rationalise it with Keira. You’re upset, yet you can’t quite get to the bottom of it. You’ve never been upset before when your actions have ended in somebody else getting injured, it’s a rare occurence and when it happens you feel a little bit of guilt but usually it fades. Injury is part of the game, it happens all the time right in front of your eyes. You suppose Aitana isn’t actually injured though, she’s sore and has a low grade ankle sprain but it’s nowhere near the same as her tearing her acl or breaking a bone because of you. You just feel drained, it’s odd, you put it down to the fact that you hardly got any sleep last night but you have this underlying feeling that it’s somehow more than that, yet you have no explanation for it.

After a long break of silence Keira and yourself fall into a fairly bland conversation about the upcoming fixtures and winter break plans. It’s so evident that there is tension in every word each of you speak, like you’re both a few syllables away from saying something that neither of you want to.

Luckily Keira is a lot more cautious than most people, unlike most of you friends or teammates in general she can control herself to a respectable level and can stop herself from word vomiting emotion fueled spieles.

By the time the driver pulls up in front of your apartment building not much has been said at all, but the overarching feeling is tense, it doesn’t feel good and the mixture of it with the everything else is making you feel sick. Keira gives you a hug after helping you unload your luggage and then leaves you. You know that outwardly you’re presenting that you want to be left alone yet everything in you is being used to stop yourself from clinging onto Keira and asking her to stay with you.

Your week is a lot of the same feelings. You have two days to yourself before training starts again and the two days are spent in bed. If you aren’t scrolling on your phone andreading every single thing that has your name mentioned then you are sleeping, or crying, or lying in bed thinking about it all. Every text from one of your teammates is left unopened, none of it matters when every single waking moment of your life is being spent thinking about the moment over and over again. It’s not just your career, not just the fact that you’re going to have to sit out in the next fixture and potentially tarnish your relationship with Sarina. You hurt Aitana, you hurt your ownt teammate. Your own actions had caused harm to somebody that you cared about. Every article, tiktok, post they were all painting you in some kind of negative light, like you were a demon hiding behind smiles. It was hard not to consider the truth behind it all, had you done what you did with malicious intent?

By the time training finally rolled around you were feeling even worse than you had a couple of days ago. Even though you’d been sleeping for hours a day there wer ebig eye bags under your eyes, you were pale and looked like you were sick. It was noticed by your teammates almost immediately, you weren’t even fully dressed in the change rooms before Pina was punching on you, talking rapidly in Catalan that you didn’t remotely understand.

“Chica, you missed our games night last night. To busy sleeping off the four goals you scored over the break, no? You need to leave some goals for other people.”

You shook Pina off as quickly as you could, you had a focus for the day and that was getting all of this over with. You had a game in three days, a game that you couldn’t ruin for your team again.

“Estas bien?”

You finish pulling your training top on and sit down on the bench in front of your locker.

“Estoy Bien.”

You focus on getting a sock on each of your feet and then your boots.

“Chica?”

There is concern laced in Pina’s voice, she’s still standing in front of you. Almost everybody else has made their way out onto the pitch, leaving the two of you and a couple of stragglers behind.

“You don’t look so good chica, are you feeling okay?”

Your boots are easy enough to lace up, once you’re done you reach behind you for your jacket, not quite sure if it’s warm enough to train in just your shirt.

“Estoy Bien. Vale?”

Before Pina can ask much more, you begin to walk towards the doors of the locker room. It’s breezy enough outside that you choose to put your jumper on, as do most of your teammates.

Aitana is doing individual training, because of her ankle. Pere says that it’s precautionary.

If you weren’t already feeling like you were on the brink of vomiting then now it’s the only thing you can feel. You feel ill, you feel completely absorbed by the sickness pooled at the bottom of your stomach. When Pere asks if you’re feeling alright you can’t say no, because you have no reason to feel as badly as you do. But it’s all the words, they’re spinning around in your head, every article, every single word.

It shows on the pitch, every decision, every pass, every shot, every tackle is helf back. You’re fearufl and it shows.

When training finally does finish, and Aitana is still working by herself with one of the coaches on another pitch you feel like it’s almost your breaking point. Until Pere pulls you over again and lets you know that you’ll be starting for the match on the weekend as a replacement for Aitana.

That’s your breaking point. You have nothing to say, nothing to think. You feel like a zombie as you walk towards the locker room. You sabotaged your teammate for your own good.

As soon as the team list is out that’s the only thing people will be saying, You don’t even want to think about what people will think when they see the photos of Aitana training by herself with her ankle all taped up. Whilst you were out on the pitch with all of your teammates. What was just starting to get better for you was only bound to relapse with the new information.

All of the girls notice your shift in behaviour. It’s Pina though who approaches Alexia on your third day of training back. Aitana is still training individually, purely for precaution and preservation. There are more important games then the one coming on the weekend and it’s not worth aggravating the small injury. It doesn’t feel like that to you though, and it’s been abundantly clear to everybody that something is up with you.

“Alexia, can I talk to you for a second?”

Alexia’s been talking to Irene about ….. for at least ten minutes and whilst Pina has no interest in interrupting it’s getting boring waiting around for a conversation to end that’s clearly dragging.

Alexia looks so care free, and Pina asking to talk to her shouldn’t change that, but the look that’s on her face changes Alexia’s demeanour almost immediately.

“What’s up?”

Pina looks at Irene awkwardly, like she’s not sure if the information she’s about to share with Alexia is for Irene’s ears. Irene seems to get the message, farewelling the two of them before heading off.

“I’m worried about y/n.”

Alexia’s silently been wondering whether to approach the subject. She’d thouyght about asking Keira is something had happened on England camp, considering that your particularly filthy mood had seemed to start afterwards. It was out of character for you, and originally Alexia had thought it was all part of some sort of prank plot. But as the last couple of days had passed it had become drastically clear that there was something else wrong. She’d thought it would be smarter to give you the benefit of the doubt, everyone had bad weeks. Alexia wasn’t aware of any relationships you were in but she wouldn’t have been shocked if your mood had been due to a breakup or something of similar origin.

“Ale, she’s been acting strange. She comes in everyday and hardly talks to anybody, she doesn’t joke around with use like she normally does, she hasn’t been answering our groupchat, she’s been avoiding all of our plans to hang out. Out on the pitch she’s been cautious but so unphased and she won’t talk to me or Ona or Patri or Kika or Esmee and I don’t know what to do anymore. Somethings really wrong, normally she’s so happy, I mean everyones noticed that the locker room has been more quiet. I thought it was going to pass, but she’s seemed really upset, like somethings really wrong and what’s happening on the internet can’t be helping it.”

The problem is that Alexia doesn’t disagree with anything that Pina is saying, she can’t dismiss any of it as overreaction because whether it’s been conscious or not she has noticed all of the things that she’s being told. She hadn’t yet pieced it all together as one thing but now that all the puzzle pieces are being laid out in front of her it seems impossible to ignore that it’s all coming together.

“On the internet? De qúe estás hablando?”

Alexia is the first to admit that she’s not exactly the best with technology, sure she’s got all the social media apps and Olga is constantly trying to teach her the ways of all of them but it doesn’t particularly interest her. She finds it easier to look at them as another means of work, it’s how she makes money, posting about football and endorsements. Otherwise she finds enjoyment in places besides her phone. Does it keep her slightly out of the loop? Yes. Does she have younger teammates to keep her up to date? Also yes.

“All the stuff about Aitana. I haven’t read into it much, but I know it’s not good. The media have been slaughtering her for that red card. She punishes herself enough after a bad tackle or pass, I can’t imagine what a red card would do.”

Alexia makes a mental note to look into it later but for now she knows that she needs to deescalate. Because if Pina is telling Alexia now then it’s not long before it blows up within the team.

“Okay. I’ll talk to her tomorrow after the game, if she’s still off I’ll talk to her. I’ll have a chat with Keira and ask if anything asked on camp, bueno? Whatever it is Pina, it can be fixed, all problems can be fixed. I’m sure it’s just been a rough week with all the travel and games, not everybody can adjust well, mixed with the recent fixtures it would be expected that everyone is feeling a bit more exhausted.”

It’s the rationalisation that seems to calm Pina down more, which was ultimately Alexia’s end goal. She can deal with you tomorrow but for now it’s crucial that she stops this from escalating within the team. When things spread it all becomes more drama and it’s not good, distractions are not what everybody needs leading into the next fixtures.

Alexia honestly forgets about the conversation completely. Between organising dinner the night before, stretching, spending quality time with her girlfriend and generally just getting herself game ready and in a good head space. She woke up feeling rested and prepared for the game ahead.

You however, were quite simply a mess. You’d hardly slept in over a week now, if you did sleep you woke up in a sweat after a particularly brutal nightmare, you were hardly eating because you always felt so nauseous from the anxiety and your performance on the football pitch had been dismaying.

Alexia, and your teammates, weren’t noticing the smaller things. You lived in your own apartment, in your own building. Nobody was aware of everything that was contributing to all the things that were beginning to show.

Alexia, hyper vigilant after Pina’s admission decided that she’d try and find you before everyone hopped on the bus to head to the opposing stadium, yet you were nowhere to be found. As everyone loaded onto the bus she almost missed you. Usually, you sat at the back, with the younger girls. Normally, Alexia gravitated somewhere in the middle of the bus, she was too old to be singing or messing around at the back but she liked to still be kept in the mix.

It was why she almost missed you, hunched into a seat almost at the very front of the bus.

“Chica?”

The way your whole body darted upwards as soon as you heard Alexia was another concerning thing that she was adding to a mental list.

“Capi.”

You pull your headphones off as a courtesy, but the reintroduction to the sounds of earth and the environment around you brings you right back to everything you’ve been feeling.

“Are you waiting for Kika or Vicky?”

Alexia feels like she already knows your answer, but she’s hanging on to a thread of hope that whatever Pina is feeling isn’t as bad as it seems.

“No, I need some sleep and it’s impossible to get any back there without somebody sticking something in my mouth or posting videos of me with my mouth half open.”

Alexia laughs, it’s the exact reason she can’t sit up the back anymore, it’s too much stupidity in a concentrated space.

“Ah, normally you’re more than happy to terrorize the rest of us, normalmente eres la reina de los estupidas.”

When your face doesn’t even respond slightly to Alexia and you have no witty comeback about her being boring or something else it’s another clear sign that something is up, she just can’t quite pin point what.

You’ve tuned out from her though, and as much as she is worried and thrown off, the bus is not a place to make a scene, specifically before a match. You will not take well to Alexia interrogating you and potentially causing any kind of emotional distress.

So, even though it pains her to do so, she walks on, she leaves you in the sinking ship you’re currently n in, taking on more and more water as every minute passes.

You’re at a point where you can admit to yourself that you are in no way fit to play.

You don’t want to be on the pitch, the fans don’t want you on the pitch, your teammates musn’t want you on the pitch, Pere wouldn’t have you on the pitch if Aitana was available and when you think about it the whole footballing world doesn’t want you on the pitch.

You flinch when you walk out to warm up and are met with boos, the Spanish fans are unlike all other fans, their passion is palpable and when one person starts booing everybody follows suit. It’s not even Barcelona fans, which is undecidedly worse and better. The overall impression is that you’ve aggravated the Spanish people.

It takes your teammates a couple of seconds to catch on to who it is the anger is being directed at but once they do it’s a domino affect of everybody turning to you, and then turning to each other and back to you. You try your best to not let it affect you, you’ve been booed before and have dealt with many angry fans, but when it starts to echo from the away side of the stands you honestly question if you’ve pushed yourself a little bit too hard.

Alexia regrets her decision not to say something to you when she sees the complete fear in your eyes as you look around at the crowd, who are vehemently booing you. It’s not a good feeling on any day to clearly have a crowd so against you but when you’re clearly off kilter as it is it’s clear that it all throws you off even more.

Before Alexia can think about it, she’s beelining straight to Keira.

“What happened on camp?”

Keira is just as thrown off by what is occurring as everyone else.

“England camp?”

It’s clear in the bewilderment in Keira’s face that she’s not understood what Alexia’s asking.

“With y/n, did something happen that nobody knows about?”

The booing finally comes to an end, but it doesn’t change the overall energy in which a whole crowd is sending your way.

“She was fine all camp, being an idiot with grace and beth and being her usual self. All the other games she was fine, and then after the Spain game, after the red card, she’s just been acting different. It’s like G at Man City all over again.”

Alexia understands everything that Keira’s saying, until the last sentence. Her English is pretty good, hger understanding is almost perfect, speaking less so but the last few words completely surpass her level of interpretation.

“G? Man City?”

Alexia notices you in the corner of her eye doing shooting practice, every time you miss and echo of cheers erupts.

“Georgia? Stanway? A couple of years ago, when she was young she got a stupid red card, it wasn’t pretty not dissimilar to the challenge on Aitana. Big mess with the media, got some really nasty messages.”

She doesn’t remember the moment itself, but she does remember reading something about it a couple of years ago.

“Gracias.”

You’re red hot with rage already, the crowd has you amped up. When Pere questions you in the locker room about your state of mind, you are quite literally in a blinding fury. It the kind of sadness fueled anger, youa re literally ripping apart at the seams and instead of actually feeling all of the innate anguish you are experiencing you turn it into anger.

“Why the fuck did you go to Pere and tell him I wasn’t ready to play.”

The tunnel is the only time you’ve been able to talk to Alexia, she’d been so held up with the pep talk, then talking to Pere, then giving inspiration to everybody else. But now that you have the opportunity you can’t ignore it.

Alexia’s eyes are ahead, you’re stuck standing behind her but she can hear you perfectly clear.

“After the game.”

It had taken enough effort for you to convince Pere that you were fine. You were begging for a starting spot that you didn’t even want, a spot that is actually making you feel sick to your stomach. It’s the doubt though, you doubted yourself in that stupid tackle that got you the card, so if you doubted yourself what was to stop everybody else from doubting you?

“No, what makes you think that you can talk to our coach about my game fitness without even talking to me? Do you have any respect for me at all?”

Alexia turns around, and it makes you feel slightly validated and slightly less like you’re about to punch her in the head.

“It’s not about your fitness.”

The punching in the head feeling returns pretty quickly.

“Not about my fitness? What the fuck else is it then? Just because I don’t act like a dickhead on the bus and decide to take a nap?”

Alexia gives you on final look before turning around, the look on her face only adds to your sickeningly consuming anger.

You go onto the pitch angry, which isn’t good for anything. Every time the ball lands at your feet, boos echo out. Every time you get tackled, which is fairly frequently because the opposition has chosen you as the punching bag for the game, cheers erupt. The game is easy enough, 90 percent of possession is with Barcelona, with you spot in the midfield the ball comes to you every few seconds. It’s mostly fine, for the first ten or so minutes. Until the tackles start to get rougher, and you’re mad, and the crowd is loud and everything feels so incredibly wrong.

It’s working you up at a fast rate, then the ball lands at your feet for the 50th time in the match already, and without even looking up at your defender, who three seconds before was standing right in front of you, her studs are placing themselves directly into your calf. It’s not a comfortable feeling, to put it lightly. You manage to clear the ball before you’re on your back, clutching at your leg and trying your best to breathe as the crowd cries out, your opponent mutters something aggressively in spanish and your teammates argue with the referee.

It’s all too much. Your just angry, and upset. Not even at your defender or at the tackle, just at all of it. You think in a roundabout way that this is all karma, that this is your punishment for whatever you did to anger everyone and yourself. You’re tired and fed up and want it all to go away.

You want to sink into the grass of the pitch and just disappear, it would make your life so much easier if in this moment you could just disappear and not face any of the stuff that is happening.

Then there are hands on you and you’re reminded that it’s nowhere near that easy.

“Estas bien? Necesitas la medica?”

You force yourself to stand up, push through, get it over with. You need to prove everybody wrong.

Whether you can see it or not, you are spinning out. Everybody else can see it, you’re frantic, timid and shaken. Patri is the one to put her hands on your shoulders and steady you before you try to return to play.

“You need to go off.”

Twenty minutes have passed, you aren’t going to force a sub when it is unnecessary.

“I’m fine.”

Patri shakes her head, in the same way Irene or Marta would when they are being tough.

“You are not okay, and you need to go off before something worse than that happens.”

You shake Patri off, and when she tries to come back you give her a shove.

“I’m fucking fine. I know when I can and cannot play.”

Like every other attempt that’s been made to try and stop you, she just frowns and walks away. The ref gives you a once over before allowing the game to return to play.

It’s not fine, nothing is fine. Your defender continuously gets away with dangerous tackles that should be continous yellow cards, the crowd is getting to you with every passing second. By gods grace three goals are scored in a few minutes, not only does it silence the opposition it puts you at ease a little bit. For the most part, you’re doing okay, or as okay as possible.

Until it gets to a corner.

There is two minutes of stoppage time, which have well and truly been used up. The corner is going to be the last play and it’s impact is not super important but the pressure is still there. You end up sandwiched between the two centre backs, and for whatever reason when the boot releases off of Patri’s foot from the corner instead of running to make room like you’re supposed to, you are yanked directly to the ground, with two boots stepping directly onto your legs.

It’s not agony, it’s definitely not good but you’re spending more time trying to not cry and collect air then focusing on everything else.

You can’t breathe, and you physically can’t stop the sob that leaves your mouth, it’s pathetic but it’s been building and you can’t stop it.

You don’t bother with listening to the call, or letting your teammates help you up or worrying about the play. The whistle has blown and you have one mission, to go anywhere away from people. You force yourself to stand up even though your back hurts from falling flat on it and your thighs hurt from being stomped on, and walk off.

Pere and the bench are still waiting in the dug out, normally you’d hug or talk or anything but right now the only thing on your mind is getting away, because if you don’t then what is now only tears is going to turn into a full panic attack. You’re working simply off of pure instinct, you have the shutters on and the only thing you are focusing on is your end goal and getting there. When you get to the changing rooms it’s empty, you bee line straight through to the bathroom and lock yourself in a stall before you actually let yourself think beyond the orders that have been set out in your mind.

Like everyone had said, you aren’t ready. You are living with the knowledge that because of your actions, your stupid actions you are being given a spot and opportunity that you didn’t deserve, you got it purely based off of the fact that you injured one of your teammates. Now you can’t even live up to the expectation of being a replacement.

The feeling that was initially what you had thought to be anxiety sickness builds up and all of a sudden you’re grateful your in the bathroom because within a couple of seconds you are kneeled on the floor letting your whole stomach contents out. It’s not a good feeling, you’ve been slowly descending towards rock bottom for days now but you’ve come to the realisation that this is it, this is your lowest point. Every time you think about the pitch you subsequently think about the crowd which leads you to think about everything happening inside your phone and then the sick feeling is back full force. The you think about Aitana, her ankle, her spot, her training, everything. All of that combined and all you can do is cry, it’s the only emotional outlet that you have enough energy for. You’d love to be able to punch something or throw something but you don’t have the energy, you’re running off of no sleep, hardly any food and now the fatigue of playing a half of football.

“Chica, can you open the door?”

Truthfully there are not many people you want to see in this moment or really ever again but Alexia might be at the top of the list. You’d been a little bit star struck when you’d gotten to Barcelona, you were an up and coming and to be on a roster with the best midfielders in the world was something you were in awe of. You were still slightly in awe of the fact that you were sharing a bench with two ballon d’or winners.

“I’m fine.”

You force yourself to stay as silent as possible even though it’s hard with the constant sobs building up inside of your chest.

“Please open the door.”

You’re at rock bottom and even if you try to swim out you’re going to need some help at some stage you suppose.

As soon as you open the door there is a resounding gasp, you close your eyes to keep a little bit of your inner peace whilst Alexia steps into the stall and locks the door behind her. There is just enough room for her to squeeze down on the floor next to you so she does without any hesitation.

“I don’t need you telling me that you were right to question me playing and that it was a bad idea, I’m already aware.”

You’re not sore from the match and yet everything hurts, you actually feel like your limbs are slowly being ripped off of your body and everything is being split open.

“I wasn’t going to say that, I was going to ask if you’re okay.”

It’s a complicated question.

“Physically yes.”

Your eyes are still closed, if you look at Alexia then suddenly this all becomes a whole lot more real.

“Mentally, emotionally?”

Just the question is enough to essentially demuzzle you, everything you were doing to stop yourself from crying out fails, and you start sobbing, in the loudest and ugliest way possible.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

Alexia bunches up jext to you, slings an arm around your shoulders and brings you in closer.

“Don’t apologise when you didn’t do anything wrong, even if everyone else is making it seem like you did.”

Deep down you do believe you did something wrong, you don’t exactly know what but you must have, you must have done something because why else would all of this have happened.

“I hurt Aitana, I took her spot, I sabotaged her.”

The crying is cathartic, you’ve been crying for days but in an unemotionally detached way to expel some of the depression instead of actually feeling it.

“No you didn’t. You mis-timed a tackle that ended in a very minor injury. Football is a game of injuries, it happens. I don’t care what you’ve read online or what you’ve heard, the facts are simple. Anyone on our team or the england team can tell you that. Nobody blames you for what happened, not even Aitana. So you shouldn’t blame yourself.”

It’s easier to blame yourself you think.

“Everybody hates me, all I’m getting are messages about how I deserve to die and how people wish I’m never able to have kids or that I get injured as payback.”

Alexia’s deep breath makes you feel queasy all over again.

“What we’re going to do is delete all of your social media apps for the next few weeks, nothing is going to make people stop being putas, si? So for your own sake you’re going to delete all of them, turn all of your comments off, turn your messages off. There is nothing more important then your peace of mind, once that’s gone then this happens. You deserve better than this, you deserve to feel better than this. You also deserve to have fun and enjoy being a part of this team, nobody thinks you sabotaged Aitana, nobody blames you. You are just as welcome here as you were before the break, you are just as valued here as you were before the break. This stupid situation is not worth your health, si?”

You wipe away some of your tears, even though they’re still coming and nod.

“You deserve better, and until people realise that we need to focus on making sure that you know that.”

You feel specifically worthless, and it’s completely your own doing.

“Now, we need to get up before my legs go to sleep and my old body is stuck on the floor in here. Not everybody has young bones like you kids.”

You flush whatever parts of your stomach decided they wanted to resurface and force yourself to stand up, but as you do so the realisation that you are midway through a match comes back and all off a sudden you feel the need to sit down again.

“I told Pere to take you off for the rest of the game, I was coming off anyway, managing minutes. You can get dressed or shower, or do whatever you need to do and then we’lltalk a bit more about how we can turn this around. I’m serious when I say that the main focus is you right now and supporting you.”

You ignore the fact that nothing was ever mentioned about Alexia managing minutes and just accept that it’s a pointless argument and you don’t exactly mind her company right now. It’s nice to know that there is somebody shining a light for you at the end of the tunnel.

[the-knight-of-the-stars]

Are we gonna talk about how that finale entirely erased any conversation about class divisions or are we too focused on ships?

Are we gonna talk about how Caitlyn for a good chunk of the season willingly enforces violence and opression against the lowest class, no doubt directly causing more deaths and suffering, and she is forgiven by the narrative without any meaningful reflecting?

Her great moment getting together with Vi is right after she JUST had a conversation with Jinx where we see she STILL doesn't recognize any class bias she clearly has, insted making it about HER.

Her and the other enforcers are treated like noble heroes in the final battle, all the blame put on Ambesa. Vi's happy ending is getting into a relationship with the exact type of person who perpetuated all the suffering she endured as a child.

Are we gonna talk about how Jayce never leaves his privilege pedestal, never actually reflects on how he was also enforcing violence to the people of the undercity and living on his bliss of progress at THEIR expense?

Jayce, who got help on every step of the way to get to where he is, who wasn't disabled, who never lived the kind of poverty or class obstacles Viktor did, who never recognized the harm he enabled and was complicit to, HE was the one to tell Viktor "People build their own destiny." and "There is beauty in imperfection" ?????

Not to mention the whole bit where he implies Viktor did all that because he wanted to "eradicate what he thought was weakness"??? Didn't we stablished Viktor wanted to HELP THE PEOPLE FROM THE UNDERCITY TO HAVE BETTER LIFE CONDITIONS?? don't try to gaslight me.

I know this is just a TV show, but I need to remind everyone that what perpetuates opressive, discriminatory and violent systems as long and as deeply as they do is indiference. Is turning your head and enabling others to stay ignorant.

Edit: You guys are misunderstanding me. And I admit it is probably my fault, I wrote this high with emotion I wasn't as eloquent.

Jayce's exact choice of words or his time living in the alternate world is nowhere near my point.

My point is, that the narrative is establishing that the privileged character, is the one that has to show (and is quite literally, textually, always the one to show) the underprivileged character that "he was looking at life the wrong way." Forgetting that Viktor's journey of feeling powerless was greatly influenced by the fact he was poor and from the undercity.

That's what I meant by it erasing the part of the plot about class systems. In the end, the story only requires Jayce to understand Viktor's struggle on a superficial level, but the text never recognizes that it as the product of a deeply rooted SYSTEMIC ISSUE. One Jayce and even Viktor on some level, benefited from and perpetuated.

Understanding Viktor still doesn't give him any moral ground, and nobody ever challenges him on that because the story isn't interested in that anymore.

And the same with Caitlyn. She knows what she did what's wrong, fine, she feels bad. Like I said, she still has a class bias, and no character challenges her on it again because the story derails to magic and fighting and whatnot.

The plot just forgets (or ignores) that layer of the story despite it being so prominent up until now.

And ignoring the class discussion does a disservice to every single character because they were initially built on it. You can see it in how they lose the essence they had on s1.

I know y'all love the characters and want to empathize with all their motivations, okay? But the fundamental issue is that characters also represent things, and more so in a story as political as this one. We also have the right to point out that the show told us they represented something and then abandoned that narrative.

What do I think they could have done differently? If I tell you scene by scene we could be here for an entire year. The gist of it is: I think they should have stuck to the character themes they already had established.

Vi as someone fiercely loyal to the undercity beyond her relationship with Powder/Jinx, and being "cursed" by the role of the older sister. Jayce as someone with good intentions but who is ultimately limited by his blind idealism. Mel as a cunning politician who thinks she is on the right path because she isn't violent like her mother, not realizing she is still perpetuating it. Caitlyn as someone kind and compassionate who realizes the institutions she believed in are fundamentally flawed, and because of the way they are built will never be on the side of kindness. Etc, etc.

None of that gets any meaningful resolution.

I am glad if you liked it, or got something from it, you are entitled to your opinion.

I wanted to say this because I was angry, and still am. Because there was so much incredible potential, and honestly, to me, it feels like the writers chickened out on actually saying something in the end.

That's all I have to say about that.

[bennetsbonnet]

I came across this screenshot of a YouTube comment about Pride and Prejudice on Pinterest ↓

Ordinarily, I don't go out of my way to pour scorn on other people's interpretations, and certainly not without good reason. But this one really, really irked me.

I don't know what's more depressing; that someone interpreted Mr Darcy and Elizabeth's dynamic in this way, or that 12,000 people apparently agreed...

...because there are two major problems with this interpretation:

Firstly, Darcy is an asshole.

Secondly, he's very much not a stupid man.

This isn't just my opinion. This is canon.

Elizabeth doesn't think Mr Darcy is a terrible person because she happened to feel like it one day. Darcy gave her every reason to think he had absolutely no redeeming features. I mean, their very first interaction, before (contrary to what adaptations portray) they had even said a single word to each other, was when he insulted her.

Not only that, Darcy knew what he was doing, as this excerpt from chapter 3 proves:

'Turning round [Darcy] looked for a moment at Elizabeth, till catching her eye, he withdrew his own and coldly said: “She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me; I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. You had better return to your partner and enjoy her smiles, for you are wasting your time with me.'

Darcy wanted Elizabeth to hear him. There is no mistaking that. Yes, Elizabeth should have listened to the repeated warnings she received from others that Wickham was not all he seemed and that, perhaps, Darcy wasn't so bad... but you can completely understand why she was prejudiced against him. I wouldn't forgive someone saying something like that about me in a hurry.

There are other examples of Darcy's rudeness to Elizabeth. His tone of voice is described as 'grave' and 'cold' when they dance at the Netherfield ball in chapter 18; when he visits Hunsford Parsonage in chapter 32, he ends their exchange in a rude manner '[Darcy] experienced some change of feeling; he drew back his chair, took a newspaper from the table, and glancing over it, said, in a colder voice: “Are you pleased with Kent?”' and there are too many examples in the proposal in chapter 34, but for me the worst is, 'towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.'

If a man implied that separating my beloved sister from the man who loved her, was kinder to them both than the agony of him proposing to me... well, I don't think he would've walked away from that exchange. Elizabeth Bennet you are a better person than me.

Regarding the other point: Darcy's intelligence is never questioned. In fact, the narrator devotes time to ensuring we understand that in chapter 4:

'In understanding, Darcy was the superior. Bingley was by no means deficient, but Darcy was clever. He was at the same time haughty, reserved, and fastidious, and his manners, though well-bred, were not inviting.'

Again, this man knew exactly what he was doing. He wasn't sorry about any of it, and he certainly was not 'internally crying.' Mr Darcy was a conceited, spoiled rich man who needed to be made aware of his flaws and reflect on them in order to become a better person; or at least, improve enough that he ceased to give the impression that he was not, at his core, a compassionate man with many great qualities.

At the same time, Elizabeth was not a poor, innocent angel who was slighted by a man and who subsequently never did anything wrong. She didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of Darcy's unpleasantness, no; but she, too, was absolutely blind to her own flaws... until she read Darcy's letter.

I just think that if you don't grasp this fundamental aspect of their respective personalities and subsequent interactions, then how can the payoff possibly be satisfying?

Pride and Prejudice is, amongst many other things, a story about two flawed people whose love for the other shapes them into the best possible versions of themselves. It's really beautiful and it's a shame to think such a key part of it is being misinterpreted.

[grimrester]

i am really so sorry to continue harping on about the watcher entertainment streaming service. but this kind of stuff (internet content as a business & marketing it as such) is truly my obsession, and i think i will implode if i don't talk about some of the takes i'm seeing.

i'd like to emphasize again i don't have strong feelings about watcher either way. i like ghost files, i watch mystery files sometimes, i watched worth it back in the buzzfeed days. i don't watch any of their shows religiously.

anyway, here's the main things i keep seeing crop up and my thoughts on each:

"watcher has 25 employees they have to pay, and employing people in this economy is good, so we should be banding together to pay them."

employing people is good if you currently have the capacity to pay them. i checked watcher's linkedin page, and many of their employees were hired within the last year or two. if they hired people they cannot pay with the business model they had before, something is seriously wrong with their internal bookkeeping/decision making. it means they either didn't know they couldn't pay these people long term, or they did know and were content with risking newly hired employees' livelihoods on a huge content pivot in the next year.

of note is that none of their employees' titles have anything to do with managing the finances of the company. they are the size of a small business but have no one aside from the figureheads of the company in charge of their finances.

this is the kind of company decision making that leads to downsizing and layoffs, which can be devastating. but you know what's worse than laying off a portion of your staff? laying off everyone because your business is going under.

"not everyone can afford the subscription, but those who can should pay it to support the watcher team."

no. $6/month for a couple hours of content (depending on what shows you actively watch and the natural fluctuation of their release schedule) is a fundamentally bad value. i can pay that much for a few movies on amazon. i can pay that much for dropout, if i want to support a smaller business instead.

and to be totally frank, even if people do sign up, i don't think they'd get enough to compete with the amount they get through patreon/sponsorships. and the fact that they didn't know how many of their subscribers would realistically sign up is a bad sign.

a pretty good conversion rate of free to paid subscribers of a service or content is 3% (usually accomplished through a free trial). given the very poor reception of the announcement, let's say about 1% of their 3 mil youtube subs pay for their service. that's 30k people paying for their new platform. that's $180k a month in their pocket.

(they currently only have 12k subs on patreon so we are being generous here.)

a sponsorship deal (based on my googling, i have less direct experience with this) is anywhere from $10-50 per 1000 views. they've gotten about 1 mil views on their last few videos. 3 mil subs is nothing to shake a stick at, but let's say they're on the lower end of the payscale at $25 per 1000 views. that's $25k a video, $100k a month if they release 1 video a week. their lowest patreon tier is 5 bucks, so even if all their subs are at that tier, that's another $60k, so $160k total. it's entirely likely they're bringing in much more than that when you factor in merch, adsence, etc.

did anyone on their team crunch numbers on how many people would need to sub to make the switch worth it? did anyone do market research on how many people they could convert to paid users? because if not, if they really didn't have a game plan for this, the subscription service was always doomed to fail.

"this was their only option to continue making the content they want to make, with the production value they want."

i watched their announcement video. a key point in that video is that they have done sponsored videos and that's what used to pay for their content, but they did not like the amount of creative control the sponsor had over the content.

look, i get that's no fun. we'd all love creatives to be able to make whatever they want. but when you are a small business with a team of employees relying on you, you have to think about making money, sometimes at the cost of creative liberties.

and they had so many other options to make money for the projects they want to make without jumping to a subscription platform.

they could have started actually promoting their patreon, and maybe done some restructuring of the tiers. why not a highly produced, special series just for patreon members? or a special high-budget episode of each series, while the main series is lower budget?

bite the bullet and continue taking sponsorship deals on some less-produced shows, while axing sponsorships from the ones the crew feels more passionate about.

schedule larger, blowout-production shows only when they can be afforded. this is what Notorious Amongus Guy streamer jerma does. he saves up for big productions like his baseball or dollhouse streams, so he can really get creative with them.

they had other options and they've tried very little, especially when you compare them to other content house business at similar scales. try guys and good mythical morning both put out significant content with significant staff, and have had to diversify their income streams with auxiliary products, shows with widely varied levels of production, etc. but it seems to be working for them. watcher has merch and that's about it, and seems to only want to increase the production quality of ALL their shows.

really, all this just boils down to a terrible business decision. it's hard to say if the watcher team is working with a consultant or anyone outside of their team, but they certainly don't have anyone internally who is experienced with running a business like this. to me, it seems very much like they got in a room together and did some extremely optimistic income ballparking with no research behind it.

and that might have been fine for three dudes running a channel alone, but if they're a business, they have to start making decisions like one.

[thehandsresisthim]

“BDSM headcanons - Simon “Ghost” Riley”

contains: discussion of bdsm, dom/sub relationship, sub!ghost, dom!fem!reader

word count: ~600

brat or obedient?

⋆｡♡ ˚ Simon is the utter opposite of a brat

⋆｡♡ ˚ although he might whimper occasionally or whine, he always, always listens

⋆｡♡ ˚ at first, it might creep you out a little; you’ll be just sitting down as you start the scene and he’s kneeling on the carpet, gorgeous brown eyes looking at you with affection, his hands on his thighs, waiting patiently for your instructions. no impatience, no begging, no pleading - just patience and obedience.

⋆｡♡ ˚ you could probably leave him sitting like this for an entire hour, and still, he would love it - Simon can’t imagine anything more fulfilling than obeying your commands.

⋆｡♡ ˚ as I said, he has no interest in bratting - trying to provoke you into punishing him (harder) would be to go against your decisions. and Simon would never go against your decisions during play.

kinks and limits:

⋆｡♡ ˚ I think that he has a keen interest in the more, uh, ‘traditional’ approach to femdom.

⋆｡♡ ˚ although he wants you to be comfortable, he can’t deny that seeing a woman - his woman - in a leather corset and heavy boots (that you just might use to put him in his place) and everything gets him going.

⋆｡♡ ˚ Simon is very much not opposed to pain. When it’s you who is dishing it out, of course.

⋆｡♡ ˚ he is a man who appreciates being hit with a paddle, or a cane - whatever you like. ideally, tie his hands up with a rope and have a hook on the ceiling prepared to tie the end of the rope to, forcing him to stay in place. he’ll whine and moan with each hit.

⋆｡♡ ˚ also, speaking of the more extreme side of femdom… yeah, he likes a bit of cbt. feel free to get out the humbler.

⋆｡♡ ˚ another thing he likes is edging. still, he won’t beg - if Mistress/Goddess/Queen decides that he’s not cumming yet, he just isn’t - but he will writhe and shake and cry. opposite of that - overstimulation. that, he loves too.

⋆｡♡ ˚ but, fundamentally, he cares about pleasing you. whether that means orally pleasuring you or moaning for you as you go about spanking him - as long as he knows that he’s being obedient and doing what you want, Simon is content.

⋆｡♡ ˚ Still, he has a few limits; these include:

-> puppy play (it just makes him feel weird. he’s a Queen’s dutiful servant, or his Goddess’s faithful subject. he’s not your dog - he doesn’t have to be taught to obey you. he’s already loyal, isn’t he? loyal and well behaved.),

-> long-term chastity (as in, wearing a chastity cage - it just doesn’t do anything for him. he’s not a brat, and if you tell him not to touch himself, he won’t. there’s no need for a cage, in his fantasy)

-> being degraded (again, this plays into his desire to be your obedient servant/subject/sub in general - he wants to serve you, endure pain for you or pleasure you. he doesn’t want to be seen as bad)

aftercare:

⋆｡♡ ˚ outside of caring for any physical ailments (like markings from you using a paddle, or a sore ass from being spanked), Simon has a great need for physical proximity to you after a scene. Since they are highly emotional to him, he often doesn’t speak a lot afterwards, but doing anything that includes you touching him is good for him.

⋆｡♡ ˚ if you do something more elaborate like giving him a massage, or just let him rest on top of you - he’s content as long as you keep him close.

⋆｡♡ ˚ Simon usually doesn’t give feedback on the scene as soon as it’s over. he just wants to be held and loved after.

⋆｡♡ ˚ most often, he gives you feedback on the scene the next day. he likes talking about it; your play strengthens your bond, your relationship, and talking about it enables him to ask for more, or to suggest other fantasies, and to make sure that you’re also comfortable being his domme.

thank you reading! for more fics, check out my master list ❤️

soap version is here :)

a small headcanon + drabble abt reader domming both simon and johnny simultaneously is here :)

[comicaurora]

Hey Red, sorry if this was asked already, but do you have any advice on writing a trickster hero? And do you have any favorites yourself?

Huh! This is something I've never really thought too hard about before, but I do have some loose and unformed thoughts!

So the trickster archetype is, broadly, a character who wins by being cunning and tricking the people around them. Typically this is because they are an underdog facing a powerful opponent, and if they face that opponent on the terms that opponent defines, they'll lose. For instance, a physically strong opponent might want to make everything into a contest of raw force; a politically powerful opponent might want to make things a legal battle; a commander of a large army might want to battle on a flat terrain-less battlefield and overpower the smaller enemy force through raw numbers; etc etc.

A trickster doesn't have the raw power to make a scenario happen. Instead, they achieve that scenario by making other characters make it happen, usually by misleading them into thinking it'll have some other outcome they want.

A classic example of this is found in a Brer Rabbit story where Brer Rabbit has been snatched by Brer Fox, and Brer Rabbit begs and pleads with him to not throw him into that briar patch, oh the torment he would experience in that briar patch would be unimaginable, drowning or burning would be bad but still better than that briar patch. Brer Fox naturally throws him into the briar patch, at which point Brer Rabbit vanishes into the underbrush and helpfully clarifies that he was born and bred in a briar patch. He was unable to escape through his own power, so instead he convinced Brer Fox that yeeting him into the briar patch would give Brer Fox something he wanted (Brer Rabbit's unimaginable torment) when in actuality it gave Brer Rabbit exactly the cover he needed to escape. It only worked because Brer Rabbit understood that Brer Fox was fundamentally not just hungry, he was cruel.

Tricksters usually achieve victory through lying, stealing, sneaking around and generally being dishonest. These are usually not seen as heroic traits, but the trickster hero is an archetype of character who is broadly heroic - and uses trickster tactics to win. It's an interesting suite of character traits to balance. In order to make a trickster heroic, them being the underdog usually needs to be played up. It's not really easy to root for someone with power to manipulate people for their own ends, but it's easy to root for someone scrappy and underleveled to manage to gumption their way to a victory over a broadly superior opponent.

A sympathetic trickster usually isn't someone who picks fights. Trouble comes to them, and then they need to find a way to escape or stop it. This is the paradigm that makes Bugs Bunny work as a trickster hero - he starts off basically every adventure minding his own business, and when someone comes around with a blunderbuss and a hankering for rabbit stew, their actions are what prompts him to unleash absolute hell on them by using toon physics and trapping them in ironclad social conventions to completely unbalance them until they're eventually defeated.

If we see a big, loud, powerful jerk try to stomp on someone small and innocuous, we're inclined to root for the small and innocuous person. This setup makes us very eager to see the small and innocuous person use tricks and shenanigans to make a fool of the powerful jerk, and it automatically makes us more okay with the sympathetic character doing on-paper unheroic things like lies and manipulation as long as they're doing them to someone we're primed to dislike.

So trickster heroes are usually fundamentally reactive characters. Something bad happens and they respond by unleashing hell. Another easy way to make a character instantly more heroic is to give them an even weaker, even more sympathetic character to protect or assist. Thus, many trickster heroes have a suite of supporting characters they're protecting who are not tricksters by nature, and are instead just there to be endangered or bullied by Nasty Mean Powerful People. Our trickster heroes stepping in to aid and protect other people thus gives their actions an even more heroic cast, because not only are they reactive to an outside threat, they're selflessly reactive.

This is the framing that's used in Leverage, where every episode has a victim of the week being cruelly taken advantage of by a jerkass of the week, at which point our team of liars, grifters and thieves roll up to ply their trade on the jerkass and award the spoils of war to the victim of the week. Because the person they're tricking is proven unequivocally to be truly awful and completely insulated from legal consequence a solid 98% of the time, we don't feel particularly bad seeing our team of heroes manipulate, gaslight and eventually absolutely destroy them over the course of a crisp 40 minutes. The vileness of the villain combos with the innocent powerlessness of the person they're advocating for, and thus their assorted unheroic qualities become reframed as absolutely heroic due to the circumstances under which they use them.

Crucial to the formula is the horrendous nastiness of the villain of the week, because if we were even kind of sympathetic to them, the schemes of the protagonists would be kinda scary. They are very good at quickly getting the bad guy to trust them and then taking apart everything they've built, and that's only fun to watch if the audience is 100% sure the villain deserves it and is not going to spend too much time thinking "wow, it would be terrifying if that happened to me." The fact that our heroes almost always take them down simply by leveraging (heh) the bad guy's badness is a big part of what makes the formula work. Almost every episode is functionally similar to a Briar Patch scenario - "oh gosh I sure hope no SOULLESS CAPITALIST VAMPIRES take advantage of how MANIPULABLE I am to try and get my MONEY and/or VALUABLES", and then the villain's own established cruelty cascades into their downfall when it runs into the dominos our heroes have set up to expose them. And that does a lot to make the audience sympathize with a crew of four self-admitted terrible people (and Hardison, who's an angel and we're delighted to have him)

Another way to get the audience to root for a potentially nonstandard protagonist is to set them up against a villain who is smug. Smugness is a very dangerous trait for any character to have, because it primes the audience to want to see them break. A villain who thinks they are too powerful or too strong or too smart to be defeated has the audience immediately rooting for them to be proven wrong just so they can watch the expression on their face. This is the strat they use in Columbo.

Every Columbo villain is rich and powerful and very insulated from legal consequences, and we start every episode seeing them arrange and execute an attempt at a perfect murder. We know from the start how they did it and usually why, and because they are smug - they are almost never regretful or reluctant - we become invested in seeing how Columbo figures out what they did, how they did it, and how he can prove it and get them arrested. Columbo is a nonstandard kind of trickster hero, because he is deeply and fundamentally a Lawful Good archetype, but he is also a very casual liar. The only time the audience sees Columbo almost certainly telling the truth is when he's dealing with background characters, his fellow policemen or his dog, or when he's by himself silently putting the pieces together; at all other points in the episode he will typically conceal how much he knows, how he knows what he knows and why he's asking specific probing questions. The audience has a tremendous amount of dramatic irony in terms of information about the perfect murder Columbo has to disassemble; we'll see Columbo zero in on exactly the one small detail that pokes a hole in the supposed airtight alibi, but instead of saying "I think you killed them and I am determined to prove it" he'll dance around why he's focusing on those details - just curiosity, just a desire for completeness, his superiors told him to continue the case and he doesn't know why, his wife is just such a big fan of their work, etc etc.

As a rule, the first time in any given episode that Columbo admits he's suspicious of the villain is the beginning of the last scene of the episode when he proves that they did it and they subsequently surrender. When Columbo is dealing with the villain, absolutely nothing he says can be trusted until that final scene - and it's a rare treat to get a glimpse of Columbo showing an honest emotion, especially something like genuine fury. Most of the time he maintains a very harmless and affable attitude, but sometimes when the villains are very smug and they know he's suspicious of them but can't prove anything yet, his righteous anger peeks through and we see why he does this.

He's a trickster hero because he can't unravel the case, the villain's motivation and the shape of the crime if the villain knows everything he knows and can correspondingly keep up with him. But he is 100% committed to exposing the truth of the situation and making the murderer face justice. Their perfect alibi is supposed to protect them from everything, but it's their confidence and certainty that they could never be caught that Columbo leverages to win. They never know entirely what to make of him, and he's never wholly honest with them - and with the audience - until the very end of the episode. It's good, cathartic payoff to an episode's worth of lies and manipulation from both main players, and it's always fun to see the non-smug party on the side of justice come out on top.

Some trickster heroes are more like standard heroes with trickster tendencies that occasionally surface. These guys are usually pretty straightforward, but in a pinch they can bust out a surprisingly cunning scheme or two - one such moment hits at the climax of Across the Spider-Verse, and it's a great moment of characterization for Miles, who has thus far been a pretty typically heroic guy who has unfortunately spent the entire movie thus far being lied to by people he trusted. It kicks off an enormously long and complicated chase sequence that takes the entire spider-community out of the home base chasing him through an absolutely massive complex and eventually onto a space elevator. It's such a fluid scene, you kind of just accept that it's a desperate chase sequence - Miles is just running. It doesn't occur to the other spider-people that Miles might have a plan beyond running until he basically tells Miguel that, hey, he did just get every other spider-person out of the facility that has the portal to get him home. He wasn't just running away, he was luring everybody away so he can leave.

And this moment is fantastic on a meta-level, because Spider-Man is traditionally a bit of a trickster hero. Most of his enemies are able to physically outpace him, and he needs to use mobility and strategy to take them down, often luring them into environments that work against them - like a fun moment in Spectacular Spider-Man where Spidey defeats the Rhino by luring him into a steam tunnel and basically giving him heatstroke through his armor plating. But because the entire core theme of this movie is "Miles isn't a real Spider-Man," it literally doesn't seem to occur to the other spider-people that Miles's seemingly panicked running might be him pulling a Spider-Man on them. We're so used to being in Miles's head and knowing when he's got a plan or a ploy that this is a very fun moment to watch. He's successfully deceived an entire army of spider-people, and the audience is just as blindsided as Miguel - and a little less electrocuted, so it's a lot more fun for us.

So yea, trickster heroes are a fun little space of character, but you gotta be careful to put them in the right kind of situation, lest their fundamental dishonesty come across as alarming rather than extremely rad.

[lover-of-mine]

Okay, I've been meaning to make this post and I never make it, but I'm rewatching s1 and the thoughts are in my head so, what better time than now. Like, I made this point before but I never went into detail.

The thing with 911 and love interests and the way none of Buck and Eddie's love interests ever stood a chance, is because in order for you to make a relationship work on a tv show, you need to make sure your audience cares about both parts. Obviously, getting 2 mains together, madney or bathena, works very easily because both characters exist on their own, so you're already invested in all parties involved, it's a lot easier to make the relationship work because you don't need to spend time making people care about anyone individually, you're just making them care about the relationship. But then you have the issue of making people care about a relationship when one of the parties is only there to be a love interest.

So let's take Henren. For all intents and purposes, Karen only exists to be Hen's wife, so if they didn't put in the work Karen would be very whatever, because as viewers, our loyalty in most cases will be biased towards the character we see the most. And considering we are introduced to Henren already established, they are already married with a child, which another thing that makes people be less invested, not seeing how it happened, the odds are stacked against Karen, which is bad if the show ever decides to use the character more heavily. But the show introduces her in a perfect way to avoid that happening. For starters, we meet Eva first. And we meet Eva while Hen is making up problems that aren't really there because of the ghost of Eva. We have Athena state how bad for Hen Eva is, we have the conflict Hen herself is feeling, we have her lying by omission. And yes, the whole thing leads to something a lot of people view as unforgivable, cheating, but during that whole storyline, we are siding against Hen, because she is letting this idea of rescuing Eva is making her step out on her family, so we are taking Karen's pain, we are taking Karen's side, and that makes us care about Karen, and therefore we end up invested on them together. And something else is how this all happens while we are still getting to know Hen, so there aren't any preconceived notions of how a relationship for Hen should go.

And the show knows how to work that concept in, but when we are talking about love interests for both Buck and Eddie, is that every relationship is introduced with something that's gonna make us side with them and ignore the other person. Shannon never stood a chance because she was written to be fridged, but leaving Chris is an unforgivable act, Ali isn't around and she fundamentally can't handle who Buck is, Taylor is introduced as willing to hurt Buck's family, Ana isn't around and Eddie is literally panicking about that relationship and even before that, the Christopher of it all, him getting hurt, not wanting Eddie to date, makes it so we're not the biggest fans, Natalia was only interested in Buck's death and since we were watching the damage his death did to everyone, it makes it hard to root for them, Marisol just didn't exist for the audience at all, and Tommy's past plus the circumstances they get together aka Buck hurting Eddie makes it very 😬.

And all of these happened while Buck and Eddie's partnership is continuously shown as getting stronger, so the relationships are fighting against two main characters who have a strong relationship, so it is really hard to establish something that will replace the idea of Buck and Eddie because they're fighting against 7 seasons of partnership. The thing that makes buddie is time. It's everything that happened to them (I mean, the actual thing that makes them it is Christopher but that's a different post). So for a relationship to actually replace them, you need to separate them and then give the new relationship at least half the time buddie had to establish themselves. Audiences generally don't get invested in relationships they didn't see happening, and usually when it's this far into a show and there is another option of paring 2 main characters, it's really hard to make a character likable enough to replace that. People just generally don't end up caring for a character that only exists to be a love interest.

The show knows that, see the way Karen was introduced, so that makes the way they handle Buck, Eddie, and love interests that more pointed.

[glitter-stained]

I always feel like a little sad seeing posts about how Jason's character is inherently tragic and that's what makes it good, how him being unloved, a tragic consequence of his own actions, is inevitable, and how that shouldn't change because any change on that regard is a fundamental misunderstanding of his character. Yes, Under the Hood is a tragedy. Yes, Jason survived and for a long time people have been pretty confused at what to do with the character that survives the tragic ending. That doesn't mean he should continue to be trapped in the tragedy, that there's only value in him as long as he's unloved. And maybe that's me preaching and being a party pooper again but the idea that the teenage-to-young adult character with a mental illness that has damaged all his relationships is doomed to be lonely and have bad/upended relationships forever, that he's only good as a character as long as he's hurting others and/or himself (and usually both) and isolated because of this... It's sad, at the very least. I refuse the presumption that tragedies are the only stories wise and worth telling.

Also I personally really dislike the idea that Jason isn't and shouldn't be anyone's favourite, because he made himself nobody's favourite on purpose. Did he make himself a villain on purpose? Fuck yeah. Does any of his early attempts at reaching out to people hurt them? Indubitably. I maintain that this is because he wants to be someone's favourite as he is, at his worst, with his hands covered in blood. And I think he should be. (Without contradicting or damaging, by comparison, the relationships between other characters, that's the tightrope we need to be weary of when making such things, of course.)

It's like this: love, in most relationships, is conditional: you don't owe your friend or your partner to continue to love them if the relationship changes, if you change, if you become violent etc. If my girlfriend started murdering puppies, I would stop loving her. Ideally, however a parent's love for their child is unconditional. That's very often unfortunately not the case, but ideally it'd be, it's really not great for a kid to have zero parents that love them unconditionally. And most importantly, it's not just about actual unconditional love, it's about it being perceived. So it doesn't matter in the debate if Bruce actually loves Jason in spite of the murder, it matters that Jason asks for confirmation of it at the end of UTH and receives a negative answer. (similar arguments to be made about Catherine loving Jason and dying of drug overdose and Willis going to jail and dying - it's the potential perceived abandonment of it that would matter, not their agency and actual love. And it's not a question of whether he would be angry at it so much as that he'd yearn and hurt for it. And of course Sheila didn't love him at all.) That's why he, upon learning about Mia and reaching previously unknown to man levels of projection*, tries to rally her with the hope that, because she's "so similar to him" she would understand him. That's why upon learning about Dick "killing" Blockbuster Jason, again projecting more violently than a bullet, Jason makes Dick into his new favourite person (god, the concept behind BiB has so much potential why did it have to suck so bad...) Anyway, Jason to me is a character with a very intense, very overwhelming conception of love both in who he loves and how, who struggles to understand that other people love and show it differently, and it makes so much sense for him to keep looking for a person who will love him unconditionally (something that's both very rare and not necessarily healthy since, again, most relationships aside from parent-child relationships do not and probably should not include unconditional love). This is particularly interesting in the context of him having bpd (again, using bpd because i'm focusing on the interpersonal dimension that's been mostly studied within that frame) because BPD often functions around a vicious circle of "is afraid of rejection/abandonment -> does maladaptive behaviour in attempt to prevent rejection/abandonment OR protect oneself by being the one to leave first" which is what leads to the instability in relationships. It's a doomed prophecy: i have maladaptive patterns that make me think my girlfriend is gonna leave me at any time, I keep demanding to see her phone, assuming she's cheating everytime she leaves and thus demonizing her even though I was glorifying her five minutes earlier" then she's going to leave me, which is gonna reinforce my thought pattern that everyone always leaves me. But that also means that in rare instances in which the other person in the interact, for whichever reason, sticks around through that, then these incorrect thought patterns begin to change through the sheet logic of extinction: if i think that people always leave me because of something fundamentally wrong with me and people don't leave then eventually the idea that people are doomed to abandon/reject me is going to lose its power. That's, btw, an important part of why therapy works.

(*that one's a joke, btw. He's not projecting onto mia and dick to levels impossible to mankind, just pretty intensely. Very human levels of projection, might I add'. Just to clarify.)

Now, be mindful: I'm not saying make Jason an abusive boyfriend. I'm not saying put him in a relationship where the other stays because they're afraid of him, that's not unconditional love or acceptance that's just fear. Of course, the ideal version of it would be Jason goes to therapy but because dc hates me specifically this is never gonna happen, but imagine him being in a relationship, romantic or otherwise, with someone who is as intense and "unwell" about him as he is about them. I'm not saying it would fix him (again, get him so goddamn therapy jfc) but it would change him. And just as it doesn't have to be healthy it doesn't have to be tragic.

I was asked a while ago my thoughts on Jason's current stagnancy as a character and if I thought he could become interesting again, and I said yes and talked about the directions I dream would be explored with his character and their potential. My answer hasn't changed, and it's completely compatible with this, but I will add: I think Jason as a character has largely and for long enough been defined through his yearning to be somebody's favourite, and that if you want his mode of interacting with others and dynamic with different characters to change then this is a very logical way to do it. And it would make a lot of sense for it to be the catalyst for other changes in his character (ie in his name or philosophy).

Get that boy into a super intense long-term codependent situationship, is what I'm saying. Please.