#BRING THEM BACK YOU MONSTER

[lvmbien]

i started quite the discussion today in the group chat

a server full of rook dislikers and i brought in the savana rook propaganda to turn the tides for some pro-rook energy

im forever in mourning over his freckles <////3

[lambmotifz]

am i the only one who doesn’t like normal/regular wincest au

because all the supernatural storylines are the main factor that makes their dynamic so special. wincest without horror elements just. isn’t wincest

[ttrpg-smash-pass-vs]

They're elves of the shadowfell, normal human height. They specialize in teleportation and invisibility, with the casters among them throwing in confusion and fear and illusion. Be careful though, as any trained in combat start making non-elves slower and worse while within 10 feet. From depression, from the sound of it. Their angst about being more ancient and timeless than you wordlessly attaches to you like a parasite, slowing you down. Good for if you enjoy concepts like-

Shadows, but like DARKER than shadow, that lash out when they're moody

looking beautiful unless in shadow, in which case they're corpselike

ignoring pointless things like "comfort" and "morals" and "rules"

being the chosen of the Raven Queen, and on her behalf collecting dark tragedy, sorrow, and feelings of loss.

being corpse pale with jet black hair, pure black eyes, and covered with tattoos/piercings/anything that would make a generic white suburban mom in the 50's scream in terror.

Lumping them all together because they're all the same outside one having mage hand and such. Idc what weapon they're holding.

[james-p-sullivan]

disney you can’t make them look at each other like that 😭

[b4kuch1n]

tdov was like a week ago already but I just wanna say when I came over to vacation slash help my sworn brother move flat he told me, "ever since you said you wanted to get top surgery I've been thinking about it. it's straight up number two on my bucket list"

[kyliafanfiction]

I sometimes feel like characters who do truly monstrous things while also having been victims of some pretty insane shit themselves are sort of an exercise in empathy. Or at least, should be seen as such.

Like, in real life, if a person who has been horribly broken by their experiences and failed by society than proceeds to rape someone - it's hard to feel the justifiable sympathy/empathy for that person (without excusing their rape, never do that) because well, you can look at this actual human person they hurt, or worse, and it feels gross and disrespectful to the rape victim.

And this is understandable. (And applies to more than just rapists/rape victims of course, that's just the most visceral one and thus picked for that reason)

But a fictional rape victim is... fictional. You can't 'disrespect' their trauma, and while obviously rape/whatever else is real, and people may related to the rape victim and thus see your comments about the rapist also being a victim as somehow being about their experience...

Well, it's not.

Because the rapist here, didn't actually hurt a real person. Fictional characters are objects. They're objects that often grab us by the throat and refuse to leave our fucking heads, yes, but they're objects. They are tools used by writers to tell a story, and readers to tell a story.

And one of the things fictional characters are good for is allowing us to consider experiences we never had, and imagine ourselves in other circumstances and lives. (Also just fun and fascinating and interesting to watch their stories).

It's very easy to feel for the rape victim in fiction, and rightly so. That's Level 1 Empathy there. Granted, some people IRL fail that, but that's not really what we're talking about here.

Advanced Empathy, hard Empathy is feeling for the rapist. Not for the rape, of course, even if they feel guilt about it, but if someone really was failed on multiple levels and was broken and damaged and went through the sort of psychological wringer that would leave most of us here on tumblr catatonic - they do deserve the same Empathy any human (any person) who went through all that.

Even after they also do the bad thing, critically they still deserve Empathy. And that is fucking hard. I very often have a hard time feeling bad for truly awful people who also deserve empathy and sympathy, real and even fictional (despite all this, yeah, I'm not perfect on this) for what they (separately) went through.

It also becomes even harder when what they went through is utterly bound up with what they did. How what they went through and experiences is in part responsible for what they did - because they still made a choice. The circumstances may have left them not in their right mind, may have left them feeling without choice, may have driven them to things they normally might not think of or do, but they still chose to do that bad thing. And that's not okay. They still hurt someone.

And yet - one cannot remove the action from the circumstances. So you can still feel empathy, and elucidate all the factors and circumstances as to what led up to their choices and why, and it doesn't change that they did the horrible thing. The rape, or the murders, or whatever.

But circling back - with a fictional character... they didn't hurt a real person. There's no one who is real that suffered. The things the character did IRL are bad because they hurt real people.

So you're not being disrespectful to the victim by feeling that empathy, or sympathy. By exploring the things that they were a victim for. Even by wanting to focus on those things - fictional characters should be compelling in all their aspects, if they're written well.

And yet, of course, if you do that empathy and do talk about what the bad person went through and all that context, people come at you. They call you evil, just as bad as the (again, fictional) character, or they say that you're treading dangerously close to the arguments people use to defend the real people who do these things in real life. Or you're disrespecting all the victims of these crimes IRL. Especially of course, if the person coming at you has a reason this comes close to home.

But again - fictional.

In an ideal world, we'd all feel sympathy and empathy when it's called for, regardless of what the person did. Even the worst most monstrous people deserve human treatment in prison. And if you don't have empathy, that's hard. Even if you do have empathy, that's hard.

So if you look at a fictional character (who doesn't hurt a real person by virtue of being fictional) that does horrible, vile things, but went through so much, and you still can't empathize or sympathize with them... I mean, it doesn't make you a bad person, not even close, this is still fiction, and there's people I should empathize with in fiction that I don't, but...

It's still a failure of your ability to be empathetic. And we're all humans. We're all failing at that, among other things, all the time. But... it's good to be aware of that. at least?

At the very least, bear that in mind when other people are talking about that context, and that victimization. And please, for the love of god, don't fucking pretend that the victimization didn't happen, that this person who did do terrible things (in fiction) suddenly didn't also (in fiction) experience awful shit, as if doing a bad thing erases all the bad things done to you.

Again - it doesn't necessarily make you a bad person, but like... the horrible state of prisons in our society is a real, actual problem. The way we as a society dehumanize people who do bad things is a real actual problem for a lot of reasons (not least because it creates an incentive for authority that wants to dehumanize a person or a group to expand the definition of 'did bad things' to make their dehumanization now acceptable, among other things).

So yeah. Fictional character who suffers but than also makes others suffer - that's a useful exercise in Empathy. And doing that doesn't make you or anyone else a bad person, or actually defending the sorts of crimes, IRL or Fictional, that this character did. Contextualizing is not whitewashing, empathy is not erasing, and humanizing is not disrespecting the victim(s).

So yeah, they fictional character did bad things. But there's more to them than that. And you can say but and talk about what comes after but without disrespecting the fictional victim. Because the fictional victim... is just as fictional. Just as not real.

Is it possible for this to end up being taken too far? Yes. But that's a reason to be mindful of yourself when it comes to real people, not to never do it. And when it comes to fictional people - again, fictional. Nobody was actually, really hurt.

(I really do want to make clear, before people read the tags, that this applies to all crimes these sorts of characters do, rape was just picked as the one to use as the example.)

[agalychnisspranneusroseus]

RiAAU Sasha's complicated relationship with her adoptive parents, Percy and Braddock, stems from an awkward mixture of unconditional love, resentment over their inability to protect her from Grime in her childhood, and their fear of what she's become.

[hauntingblue]

Jayce telling vi she won't make it on her own.... okay mr. projector...

[independent-fics]

Whoop I was tagged by @werewolfsmile and @ghostlyarchaeologist to hit shuffle on my music and list the first ten songs! Thank you!

Spotless (ft. The Lumineers) - Zach Bryan

Signed, Sealed, Delivered - Stevie Wonder

Carolina - Taylor Swift

Homesick - Noah Kahn

Valerie (Live, BBC Radio) - Amy Winehouse

Hey Driver (ft. The War and Treaty) - Zach Bryan

How Did It End? - Taylor Swift

7 Years - Lukas Graham

It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me - Billy Joel

Roslyn - St. Vincent and Bon Iver

And tagging as many people as I can!

@cardsagainstthelibrarians @nival-kenival @aardvaark @brierburrbrito @speedycollectorbluebird @123ohwell @hopecomesbacktolife and anyone else who wants to join!

[thisblogisblank]

One of my favorite pieces of msm lore is the fact that yes, you can technically revive the dead, but it's considered rude.

[omarwolaeth]

Sometimes I think about how the natural energies might not have been as clean cutting as we're lead to believe, and how Yuuya and Yuzu might not be the only split-soul existences, entirely because of a blast radius that neither Ray nor Leo knew about if the En cards ever went off.

[sneakystorms]

Maybe I should've seen it coming with the weight placed on the concept of "desire" but i really wasn't expecting dungeon meshi to turn into a full on buddhist lecture

[fortunefavorsthebrave-dude]

honestly about to be sick over tbhk i started reading it for something quick to catch up with before the next con and ended up so so so unwell about the closest to canon gay boys i have maybe ever seen in a shonen manga. what the fuck.

[demigodofhoolemere]

Finished the Umbara arc for the first time. Nothing is okay.

[kakusu-shipping]

My mini contribution to @echoes-lighthouse's Evil Slasher Orphanage! My wife Anna and I are here to help, and brought a few more kids of our own.

I really thought I was a horror fan until I sat down to draw this and came up blank. I guess I'm not a slasher guy, because a LOT more Monsters and Beasts came to mind, so it took a while to form a list. Though I did include Sam who is certainly a Creeture but.. They're human enough.

[nerosdayinanime]

if i do go w sakonji being the owner im gonna pull that naruto gag for kakashi where every image of his face is perfectly obscured by some random object

leaf. bird. a large beetle. some paper flying in the wind. light glare. someone walking in front of him. a bag of coffee thrown across the shop. someone else's hair. speech bubbles. him facing the other way. etc