#And I'm like “Y'all cannot.”

[rehide]

the thing about hide is that he never once expressed visible hurt abt kaneki not telling him he's a ghoul. it was never a topic of discussion between them, not even in re when it's a much safer conversation to have. he never (at least openly) feels betrayed about it, and still uses his every action to get closer to kaneki and the ghoul world despite how cut off he's been from kaneki's life. and i'm sure hide was smart enough to realize that kaneki's avoidance was always about protecting him, but it's hard to imagine that he wasn't at least a little hurt at some point that kaneki wouldn't tell him. and then a couple hundred chapters later kaneki's stumbling over his words in a sewer and hide's telling him how he's always known, while offering up his own life for his.

[rationales]

[maladaptivedaydreamhq]

wait wait PAUSE

am i delulu or is our girl tearing up here?

[myheartisbro-ken]

I was gonna make a little 'how are we feeling gay people' joke after watching the finale, but I've seen some of y'all are being really bitter about it, and I do not want that negativity in my life. So if y'all cannot appreciate really cunty storytelling that actually makes sense when you pay attention to it outside of shipping goggles, I have nothing to tell you

[burningcheese-merchant]

i cannot in good conscience ship hollyberry and eternal sugar because i'm too enamored with chaos berserker couple hollytaya. i can't wait to see them together again in beast yeast.

I'm happy you're so excited, anon friend. May that hope and joy fuel the smoldering embers burning within your heart in your darkest days

In the meantime, I shall continue bracing myself for my second impromptu descent into the fiery depths of Hell. Virgil bailed out at the last second so I have to go alone again. God have mercy on my soul

[the-way-astray]

keefe would not like me and i don't like him: masterpost

hey everyone . . . there are too many freaking strieefe things now. sigh. so naturally it's time for a masterpost . . . but before that i should clear up some misconceptions probably

this is a bit. i am not actually mad. if i was i would make a more serious-toned post telling strieefe anons and non-anons to knock it off

having said that i am vehemently and utterly anti strieefe. awful, awful ship. horrendous. will fight the people that ship it until the day i die

this post explains the origins of strieefe

yes, i am okay with strieefe fics being posted to ao3 (i've had a couple of anons ask me this). if you happen to do this, tag me as stria sixteen. also send me the fic. i want to read it

i am not okay with smut (nobody has done this yet, but just to be clear) . . . but anything up until that point is fine. the makeout fic was fine. the only-one-bed trope was fine. the shirtless keefe was fine

please please please please if you are going to send me fics, name them. name them!!!! it doesn't have to be a profound, thoughtful name (this is strieefe, after all, cringe is expected). but all fics are tagged by their names, and it helps keep things organized, so please!!!! i also tag all asks i receive with the asker's url, so fics are also tagged by the writer's url (or anon)

the general strieefe tag (for me) is #keefe would not like me and i don't like him. it is blockable. do with this information what you will. other people may use different tags. if you don't want to see strieefe-related stuff at all, i also recommend blocking off #strieefe and #to strieefe or not to strieefe

alayda is a menace but i don't hate her. stop sending me weird asks about her. they will be deleted

katie is a traitor to the sokeefe nation

always forever by alayda (@alaydabug2) and @ishipstrieefe (pro)

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

never change by lisa (@lisalovesapplesauce) (pro)

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

hate your lover, love your hater, and be studied by her friend by doe (@worldsunlikemyown) (anti)

context

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

treehouse by treehouse anon (pro)

chapter one

pride pin by pride pin anon (anti)

chapter one

chapter two

sometimes grief is acceptance by alayda (pro)

chapter one

chapter two

hold me like a grudge by emelin (@thishumanformislimiting) (pro)

chapter one

miscellaneous alayda fics (pro)

high on your love

the way to my heart is an a+

love in the air

chapter forty-two au (actually this one might be anti)

only your warmth

crossover (converted to anti by by me)

miscellaneous non-alayda fics (disclaimer: some of these could barely even be considered fics)

unnamed fic by anon one (anti)

unnamed fic by cricket (@gay-witches-are-the-best) (anti)

unnamed fix-it fic of alayda's makeout fic by anon two (anti)

unnamed fic by a.j. (@lgbtqforeverything) (anti)

unnamed fic by @kotlcpuppetshow (anti)

unnamed fic by anon three (anti)

atlantis blows the fuck up by anon four (????)

unnamed fic by @oopsies-maeve-did-a-thing (pro)

fanart (will it never end)

by alex (@the-soul-detectives) (pro)

fanart of alayda's chapter forty-two au by aspen (@aspenaspenaspenaspenaspen) (pro)

fix-it fanart of high on your love (alayda's makeout fic) by aspen (anti)

by connie (@absolutely-existing) (anti)

by alayda (pro)

by emelin (pro)

by emelin part two (pro)

by fin (@fintan-pyren) (pro)

fucking. songs. (and song-adjacent things like poems.) what world do i live in

unlikely couple by katie (@myfairkatiecat) (pro)

a ballad of keefe and stria by emelin (pro)

[trashcanwithsprinkles]

debate

(topic: how many and what configuration of kids do they give off vibes of having (either at present or in the future)(partner is irrelevant in most cases, some could be single parents for all i care))

[writing-is-hard-af]

Time to write a fix it. Or multiple.

[redhoodinternaldialectical]

People talking about remembering early childhood has me fucked up because they keep distinguishing between 'remembering a handful of events with very little context and only a poor sense of which ones happened when or even if they're real or not' and... and some OTHER kind of memory??? Bitch the sea of blackness with the tiny floating Singular Event islands is all I've got! What the fuck do you mean there's supposed to be something that develops after that?! I though the whole point of chronological memory was just that you had something to play connect the dots and logic puzzles with in order to get kinda close to what happened???

Like if you asked me what happened last Monday, there is NOTHING there in my head, no record at all, the best I can do for you is pull up what I think my scheduled was supposed to be, and that's how it is for 80+% of all my days. In terms of actual things I've experienced, I feel like I can't possibly be forming more than like 200 new memories a year. Heck, anything over 50 still sounds fake af

On the days where something really impactful happened I can give you maybe up to as many as 5 brief, indistinct sense memories and a mostly coherent sequence of events.

And you're telling me that's not normal???

What the hell is happening in other people's heads when they try to remember last week? Can you... replay a whole day like a daydream movie?? Do you really, actually form at least one memory around every single day??? If so, what the hell do you DO with all that? Where the fuck does it all GO?

Is this why my psychology classes kept acting as though memory being unreliable was supposed to be surprising instead of the most 'duh'-moment obvious thing on the planet?

[hadesoftheladies]

went on the twitter radfem space and it was full of the most obscene racism and violent language. tiktok is absurd, too. and now radblr is just near constant in-fighting and bullying. there's just no room for black radical feminists on the internet. i think i've gotten all i was ever going to get from this place. i think it's time i just move out of here and focus on reading theory and building irl community and maybe focus on the youtube channel. any mutuals that want to keep in touch, y'all can message me and we can figure out how to stay in touch elsewhere! (like discord maybe!) those who want to follow the channel can subscribe and stay subscribed until i upload. i may just create a website specifically for blogging and my thoughts after compiling the posts i've kept on this account. not deactivating immediately, since i still have loads to figure out and arrange, but i don't think i'm helping anyone on here and i'm tired of the hostility. i don't need anymore in my life. i'd rather just curate in my own space and accumulate a volume of work that i can use for other things and not have my blog polluted by racism, homophobia and anti intellectualism. i'm tired of trying to convince the unwilling. i'd rather just be a proper essayist and have people fight about me rather than with me XD.

[cuddlytogas]

an incomplete list of terrible but extremely popular Our Flag Means Death takes that I would like to never see again please

(and I do mean popular, as in, lots of people seem to think they're canon, to the point where I feel slightly insane and like I was watching a different show to everyone else)

1. Ed's mum was loving and nice and supportive, if hampered by her bad situation

this comes up more in fic than analysis, to be fair, but good god, what show were some of you watching? this isn't to vilify her, because yeah, she's clearly a product of colonialism, white christian supremacy, and domestic abuse, but like. that doesn't make how she raised Ed good. clearly she was trying to keep him safe, but "we don't deserve nice things", and especially "it's not up to us, it's up to god", speaks to me of someone who squashes down any ambition on her son's part, has fully bought into the lies of christian colonialism, and tries to pass them down to her son.

as does happen in colonised communities, particularly among older generations. I know us white people like to think that every indigenous person is a perfect left-wing anti-imperial activist, but that's simply not the case, and Ed's mum is so clearly an example of an older conservative christian indigenous parent who had to believe the lies told by their coloniser in order to survive, but is now passing on that trauma to their children. and I just...

if I read one more fic where Ed's mum is a perfect loving supportive angel who always believed in her kid and always supported and protected him, I'm gonna scream. yes, it's sweet, and it's fun to sometimes veer from canon and give your blorbo nice things, but it's still veering from canon. and yet, I see very few people acknowledge that, or actually talk about the nuances of Ed's mother, and how she definitely tried to protect him, but was far from sweet, doting, and unconditionally supportive.

2. Ed's loving look when Stede is picking food from his beard in 1x07

like most of these things, I enjoyed it as a joke or exaggeration at first, until I realised that people were actually being serious. but every time I watch that scene, I see Ed looking absently-mindedly over Stede's shoulder, because a) that's what you do when someone leans in to pick something off you, and b) surely the point of the scene is that they're so comfortable and easy together that they don't notice the intimacy of what they're doing, but Lucius, an outside observer, thinks it's obvious. right?? I can't be the only one seeing it???

[sigh]

anyway. finally, the really really big one:

3. Ed is a soft uwu babygirl princess femme bottom sub who loves her cat collar and is teaching Stede how to dom him in the "say you're the captain" scene

I mean, there's not much to say except to link to duke's absolutely phenomenal twitter thread about "how the 'babygirlfication' and infantilization of ofmd ed teach is an extension of racist perceptions of indigenous men being inherently violent and thus needing to be emasculated to be considered sympathetic"

but especially That One Fucking Scene, good lord. talk about taking shit out of context. everyone looked at a slowed-down gif of one shot in the trailer and cried "babygirl!! he's such a simp, he just wants to be dommed!!", when actually that scene is about how a) Stede is cringefail and terrible at being a typical harsh, commanding pirate, and b) Ed is lovingly embarrassed by this. he encourages Stede to assert himself (and give Ed something to do during his probation/help him make amends with the crew), but like. normally. he's acting perfectly normal in that scene, and mostly annoyed by the outfit and embarrassed by how badly Stede fails. but just because he's sitting down while Stede is standing, and he happens to take a breath in that one shot (because, you know, people breathe sometimes), everyone's doubled down on their "submissive babygirl" bullshit, and I can't get the fuck away from it.

which - listen, it's fun for me, too! it's fun to explore exaggerated aspects of a character, it's fun to read/write/draw that angle in smut, I get it! but I keep seeing people keep claim it's literally canon, and I cannot stress enough that that is Straight Up False. for the love of god, please just watch the show without your (potentially kinda racist) bias glasses on, and remember to treat the characters with respect instead of projecting onto their every interaction a shallow dom/sub binary just because you find it hot.

Our Flag is a show very specifically about masculinity, and what it means to be a man; how assumptions about that can harm and restrict men; and how men can grow beyond them. it's a nuanced and sympathetic examination of this. the whole point is that Ed is allowed to like nice fabrics and be tired of violent piracy and still be a man. the point is that two men fall in love - equal, honest, sincere love - and are still men, still exactly who they are.

(on that note, insisting that Ed is canonically trans or femme because of these things often ends up just leaning into gendered stereotypes: men are harsh and active and dominant, and women are soft and passive and submissive, and if Ed's not the former, he must be the latter, right? it also tends to hetero-ify the central relationship, casting Stede as "the boy" and Ed as "the girl", needing one to be masc and one femme. not always, and again, I understand and have enjoyed transformative works that take those elements and run with them, and explore what the story could be like if Ed were trans/nb/etc - but it's still a transformative interpretation. it's not canon.)

relatedly: those fucking wedding toppers! it seemed blatantly obvious to me that half the point of those scenes was that Ed is distraught and blaming himself for Stede leaving because he wasn't the ideal partner. it's his entire arc for the first half of season 2! Ed hates himself and believes there's something wrong about him that makes him unlovable. so he keeps and then discards the wedding toppers, painting himself onto one of them, because he's projecting himself onto an image of ideal/successful romantic love that he thinks Stede wants, and in which he doesn't fit. he's trying to mould himself into someone else to make himself lovable, not realising that Stede already loves him for himself.

so it's important to the whole narrative that Ed's yearning for/projection onto the wedding toppers is false, and born from his insecurity. he gets drunk, and play-acts a stereotypical image of romantic happiness into which he doesn't fit, but real love looks nothing like that, because real love isn't found in stifling hegemonic cultural structures, but honest, emotional connections between people allowed to be their whole, vulnerable selves. Stede is not like the groom, and Ed is not like the bride, because they shouldn't have to be. Ed should not (and does not) have to warp himself into a demure bride in order to be worthy of love: he's already lovable and loved exactly as he is! that's the point!! of the scene!!!!!!

like, it's important that the groom figure isn't actually like Stede, either. yes, it's blond and has a nice, peach-coloured suit, but a) Stede was very specifically unhappy in the posh, heterosexual, married state the figures represent, and b) Stede by this point looks nothing like that figurine. it's directly contrasted with the image of him in the rowboat, scruffy and plain and earnestly in love, rather than fancy, cold ceramic.

[EDIT 29/12/24: I ended up writing a whole Twitter essay about the wedding cake toppers that I then gussied up for Tumblr; so if you want a clearer, more substantial, and better supported argument about those, check that out!]

but no, I have to wade through swathes of art and fic and meta about how badly Ed wants to be a sweet little demure kitty princess, how he wants a wedding night and a ring to prove he's Stede's property, and acting as if this is somehow canon, because people on the internet have zero reading comprehension and are scared of brown men.

the whole point of Our Flag is that you don't need to compress yourself into prescribed social roles, and in fact, doing so will only make you miserable; and that racist, patriarchal, colonial institutions should be resisted and dismantled at every opportunity.

so tell me again why the ultimate message is that Ed and Stede should get married under an arch in front of an altar and their lined-up friends, with flowers and rice falling around them, all dressed in white, one in a suit and one in a dress, with rings and a kiss and a honeymoon after, before they move into a detached house with a yard and a fence and re-adopt the kids that Stede abandoned? and this isn't about promises, fidelity, or even monogamy - I'm specifically talking about everyone in this fandom who seems to think that the ultimate goal is the most stereotypical 20th century cisheteropatriarchal christian wedding, but with the name "matelotage" slapped on top, as if that takes away all of the underlying baggage.

just - I know we're all meant to hate men and masculinity and yadda yadda yadda, but actually, to be earnest for a second, men deserve respect too, because all people and all genders do. and two men are allowed to be in a relationship and still both be men - complex men, with their own, layered relationships to their gender - without having to fall into neatly-arranged dom/sub masc/femme roles, or seal the deal with a hegemonically-approved ceremony.

so please, stop reducing an indigenous lead character to a caricature of a femme uwu princess bottom just because he has long hair, wore a robe once, and you're too scared of brown men to imagine him with proper agency. and then please, for the love of god, stop claiming that that interpretation is canon.

[arty-tardigrade]

Max vs. Daniel! Who would win: a psychopathic cultist with a knife or a ten year old?

(Spoiler, it's the ten year old.)

[littlefankingdom]

OK, which comics people consider "good writing" for Jason as Red Hood? Because it seems as if anytime he appears is labelled "bad writing" for his character. At this point, it seems only Under The Read Hood is good, but, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, one story from 20 years ago isn't enough to determine his whole character? Can he not change and grow? Get worse perhaps? Should he be stuck behaving exactly the same forever, which is at a point in his life where he was really not well mentally? And don't answer Lost Days, that's the story about how he grew to be like he is in Under The Red Hood, that's not answering how he should behave now.

Btw, this is not an invitation to tell me how you would write Jason as Red Hood or what you want to see him do, and what you want DC to do with him. I'm asking WHAT CANON are you basing yourself on.

[orengejoshi]

Are we going to see demenica and 505 soon

highly unlikely, I don't care for anything other than Flug. Black Hat a little bit too.

Miss Heed perhaps? but I don't see enough in any other characters yet.

Masterpost for request status on Flug-unrelated things

I feel like atp I barely care for the canon cartoon at all, I just have a very strong fixation on Flug. I should really mention that. I have given up trying to stay in-character and basically use him like my OC. I would LIKE to move on and not be in fandom spaces anymore but sadly my autism does not let me. my brain just refuses; kicking and screaming; to be interested in a single other thing on earth than Flug since nearly 8 years.

it's insanity.

I have no NOTP or disliked dynamic, I will consume anything. paperlizard is cute. but it's a combination of me not being interested enough and others also not being interested enough so I feel it is not worth it to make this content rn. the fandom is ultra turbo dead.

I don't want massive attention -godspeed I don't- but an artist that doesn't get any response is a demotivated one. I know no one who is interested (enough) in these characters.

I would never make fanart of those characters alone¹, I couldn't get my unmedicated ADHD to focus on smth my heart doesn't 110% want to do from pure passion. I take no commissions, I don't draw for money.

you can basically expect to see one and the same thing for a decade straight from me

if I draw them in the future it will be heavily Flug-focused. HEAVILY.

(¹one exception is if a close friend of mine suddenly wants to see one of them)

so that's basically all you need to know! I don't consider myself a member of this fandom anymore since months

[simplepotatofarmer]

i miss c!rivals duo

[vee-is-a-clown]

Happy birthday, Keith!