#Because for some reason even many of the people who like to use “it's the system” as a way to hand-wave away individual accountability

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

ok i am not coping well with having a post on which a high percentage of rebloggers have many things to say be as popular as this one is and i am too much of an anxious control freak to turn off notes without also turning off reblogs so i am turning off reblogs but not before saying a few quick things that have come up in the notes (because see above re: anxious control freak lol):

first and foremost i would like to formally apologize for saying megalodon instead of megalosaurus when i sat down to type this post in (this is true) an attempt to wake myself up more fully after a nap

i have also just been informed that i typed the title of the study wrong... lessons here for all of us perhaps.........

i don't think this study is like perfect or "proof" of anything in particular (in fact of course no study is...) although for what it's worth at least some of the complaints about the study's methodology get basic facts about its design wrong lol (in particular, it's stated that students had the option to read silently if they were uncomfortable reading out loud). i appreciate this study because as a person who encounters students professional who really struggle to read - including proficient-seeming students who completely fall apart whenever they have to read anything more than like 75 years old - i have come to feel more and more intensely over time that people who discuss literacy and reading pedagogy have a real gap in their understanding of what struggling readers are actually doing when they read. nothing i encountered in my master's degree, even among the material that was not lies (lol), and nothing i've encountered in reading about literacy and reading pedagogy since, has really seemed like it captured what i was seeing in students who were not missing a detail or two, or confused by a sentence here or there, but totally and completely lost in ways that i have come to believe people who can read proficiently honestly have difficulty envisioning. and the qualitative observations made of this study's problematic readers are the first time i've ever seen anyone in the ed space other than Me On My Own Blog Or Texts To Friends put to words the phenomenon i have encountered both in the classroom at the third grade level (and younger but third grade is when it got really obvious because of the nature of the books being read) and as a tutor working with affluent, academically successful 11th- and 12th-graders who cannot make it through a single paragraph of a speech by lincoln. i'm not really attached to the specific cut-off points determined by the study or numerical distribution in the article and i almost regret sharing the attention-grabbing 58% because what i find most of value here is the qualitative description of something i have seen, have struggled to put into words, and have come to believe that - whatever its actual prevalence - is much more common than is assumed by the vast majority of educators tasked with some form of teaching reading, from early elementary all the way through the college level.

you don't know me from adam so i guess you have no real reason to believe that i am coming at this from the accumulation of going on a decade of professional experience i have spent considering the hidden cognitive processes of struggling readers and am not just ungenerously overgeneralizing from a handful of student comments that have perfectly reasonable alternative explanations... but... i am. lmao.

some people seem to feel inclined to "defend" the problematic readers either by critiquing the study (which see above) or by saying "well of course they struggled, dickens is hard/they don't know anything about victorian england." two notes here: (1) neither i nor the authors of the study are attacking these students by attempting to describe what they can or can't do when faced with some complicated prose (2) i'm not really sure how this stands in contradiction to my own argument that the educational system has seriously failed these students... like i don't know what your vision of successful education is that does not include learning to read complex text written in a mode distinct from contemporary daily language use or enough general knowledge about the world to be able to plug in to a novel written in victorian england.

also... alright i said this in a separate post but i am putting it here too i guess: the problem with accepting that people will not be able to read the complex syntax that was common in older times (dickens - at least in those 7 paragraphs - is not actually particularly longwinded or syntactically complex when considered among many other pre-twentieth century authors) is that we live in a country quite literally founded on syntactically complicated documents written hundreds of years ago. i believe citizens - all citizens! not just the english majors even! - have the right to an education that prepares them to read for themselves the written history of their country. i will not ever accept that this is an unreasonable standard.

much of the point of my list of bulletpoints was to try to head off at the pass people trying to identify the sole cause of this because people fucking love One Weird Trick education takes but some people managed this anyway... the persistence of the human spirit i guess lmao. anyway education is one of the most complex topics out there and nobody who claims to say "it's all [blank]" knows what the fuck they're talking about :)

also the reason i highlighted the date of data collection was to avoid people turning this into a gen z thing, but for the record i don't think we have any evidence to suggest this was new in 2015 either. i think it's always important to remember in literacy conversations that the idea of universal college-level literacy is historically a very new one and many problematic readers currently in college are people who in previous generations simply would have ended their formal schooling much earlier than they have. if you look at this table from the national center for education statistics, you can see that the percentage of US adults over twenty-five with a high school diploma crosses into more than half the population sometime in the 60s (it jumps from 1960 to 1970 so we can't see the exact year).

students/children vary wildly in how much support they need to learn to read, which i say mostly to share that your own ability to read well is not necessarily proof that the people who taught you how to read did a good job, nor are your own memories of learning how to read necessarily useful guides for the right way to teach people how to read. in particular - and i am not trying to be harsh in this correction because it's a common myth and an understandable assumption - i do want to push back on the idea that the key to better reading is parents reading to their children, because parents of dyslexic children have shared how personally hurtful to them and genuinely harmful to their children's education it was to be told over and over "make sure you're reading to them at home" when they were already doing that and it was not helping their dyslexic children learn how to read. (i think this might come up in sold a story... if not then i saw it on twitter back when sold a story was rolling out and i was obsessively following the convos about it to a degree where i had to force myself to stop because it was bad for my mental health lmao.)

charles dickens did not get paid by the fucking word!!

i appreciated this study: "They Can't Read Very Well: A Study of the Reading Comprehension Skills Of English Majors At Two Midwestern Universities"

essentially, a pair of professors set out to test their intuitive sense that students at the college level were struggling with complex text. they recruited 85 students, a mix of english majors and english education majors - so, theoretically, people focusing on literature, and people preparing to teach adolescents how to read literature - and had them read-while-summarizing the first seven paragraphs of dickens's bleak house (or as much as they made it through in the 20 minute session). they provided dictionaries and also said students could use their phones to look up whatever they wanted, including any unfamiliar words or references. they found that the majority of the students - 58%, or 49 out of the 85 students - functionally could not understand dickens at all, and only 5% - a mere 4 out of the 85 students - proved themselves proficient readers (leaving the remaining 38%, or 32 students, as what the study authors deemed "competent" students, most of whom could understand about half the literal meaning - pretty low bar for competence - although a few of whom, they note, did much better than the rest in this group if not quite well enough to be considered proficient).

what i really appreciated about this study was its qualitative descriptions of the challenges and reading behaviors of what the authors call "problematic readers" (that bottom 58%), which resonated strongly with my own experiences of students who struggle with reading. here's their blunt big picture overview of these 49 students:

The majority of these subjects could understand very little of Bleak House and did not have effective reading tactics. All had so much trouble comprehending concrete detail in consecutive clauses and phrases that they could not link the meaning of one sentence to the next. Although it was clear that these subjects did try to use various tactics while they read the passage, they were not able to use those tactics successfully. For example, 43 percent of the problematic readers tried to look up words they did not understand, but only five percent were able to look up the meaning of a word and place it back correctly into a sentence. The subjects frequently looked up a word they did not know, realized that they did not understand the sentence the word had come from, and skipped translating the sentence altogether.

the idea that they had so many trouble with every small piece of a text that they could not connect ideas on a sentence by sentence basis is very familiar to me from teaching and tutoring, as was the habit of thought seen in the example of the student who gloms on to the word "whiskers" in a sea of confusion and guesses incorrectly that a cat is present - struggling readers, in my experience, seem to use familiar nouns as stepping stones in a flood of overwhelm, hopping as best they can from one seemingly familiar image to the next. so was this observation, building off the example of a student who misses the fact that dickens is being figurative when he imagines a megalodon stalking the streets of london:

She first guesses that the dinosaur is just “bones” and then is stuck stating that the bones are “waddling, um, all up the hill” because she can see that Dickens has the dinosaur moving. Because she cannot logically tie the ideas together, she just leaves her interpretation as is and goes on to the next sentence. Like this subject, most of the problematic readers were not concerned if their literal translations of Bleak House were not coherent, so obvious logical errors never seemed to affect them. In fact, none of the readers in this category ever questioned their own interpretations of figures of speech, no matter how irrational the results. Worse, their inability to understand figurative language was constant, even though most of the subjects had spent at least two years in literature classes that discussed figures of speech. Some could correctly identify a figure of speech, and even explain its use in a sentence, but correct responses were inconsistent and haphazard. None of the problematic readers showed any evidence that they could read recursively or fix previous errors in comprehension. They would stick to their reading tactics even if they were unhappy with the results.

i have seen this repeatedly, too - actually i was particularly taken with how similar this is to the behavior of struggling readers at much younger ages - and would summarize the hypothesis i have forged over time as: struggling readers do not expect what they read to make sense. my hypothesis for why this is the case is that their reading deficits were not attended to or remediated adequately early enough, and so, in their formative years - the early to mid elementary grades - they spent a lot of time "reading" things that did not make sense to them - in fact they spent much more time doing this than they ever did reading things that did make sense to them - and so they did not internalize a meaningful subjective sense of what it feels like to actually read things.

like, i've said this before, but the year i taught third grade i had multiple students who told me they loved reading and then when i asked them about a book they were reading revealed that they had absolutely no idea what was going on - on a really basic literal level like "didn't know who said which lines of dialogue" and "couldn't identify which things or characters given pronouns referred to" - and were as best as i could tell sort of constructing their own story along the way using these little bits of things they thought they understood. that's what "reading" was, in their heads. and they were, in the curriculum/model that we used at the private school where i taught, receiving basically no support to clarify that that was not what reading was, nor any instruction that would actually help them with what they needed to do to improve (understand sentences) - and i realized over the course of that year that the master's program that had certified me in teaching elementary school had provided me with very little understanding of how to help these kids (with perhaps the sole exception of the class i took on communications disorders, not because these kids had communications disorders but because that was the only class where we ever talked, even briefly, about things like sentence structures that students may need instruction in and practice with to comprehend independently). when it comes to the literal, basic understanding of a text, the model of reading pedagogy i was taught has about 6 million little "tools" that all boil down to telling kids who functionally can't read to try harder to read. this is not productive, in my experience and opinion, for kids whose maximum effort persistently yields confusion. but things are so dysfunctional all the way up and down the ladder that you can be a senior in college majoring in english without anyone but a pair of professors with a strong work ethic noticing that you can't actually read.

couple other notes:

obviously it's a small study but i'm not sure i see a reason to believe these are particularly outlierish results (ACT scores - an imperfect metric but not a meritless one IMO for reading specifically, where the task mostly really is to read a set of texts written for the educated layperson and answer factual questions about them - were a little bit above the national average)

the study was published last year, but the research was conducted january to april 2015. so there's no pandemic influence, no AI issue - these are millennials who now would span roughly ages 28-32 (i guess it's possible one of the four first-year students was one of the very first members of gen z lol). if you're in your late 20s or early 30s, we are talking about people your age, and whatever the culprit is here, it was happening when you were in school.

i think some people might want to blame this on NCLB but i find this unconvincing for a variety of reasons. first of all, NCLB did not pass because everyone in 2001 agreed that education was super hunky-dory; in fact, the sold a story podcast outlines how an explicit goal of NCLB was to train teachers in systematic phonics instruction, because that was not the norm when NCLB was passed, and an unfortunate outcome was that phonics became politicized in ed world. second, anyone who understands anything about reading should need about ten minutes max to spend some time on standardized test prep and recognize that if your goal is truly to maximize scores... then the vast majority of your instructional time should be spent on improving actual reading skills because you actually can't meaningfully game these tests by "practicing main idea questions" (timothy shanahan addresses this briefly near the top of this post). so i find it very difficult to believe that any school that pivoted to multiple choice drill time in an attempt to boost reading scores was teaching reading effectively pre-NCLB, because no set of competent literacy professionals would think that would work even for the goal of raising test scores. third, NCLB mandated yearly testing in grades 3-8 but only one test year in high school; kansas set its reading and math test year in high school as tenth grade. so theoretically these kids all had two years of sweet sweet freedom from NCLB in which their teachers could have done whatever the fuck they wanted to teach these kids to actually read. the fact that they didn't suggests perhaps there were other problems afoot. fourth, and maybe most saliently for this particular study, the sample text was the first seven paragraphs of a novel - in other words, the exact kind of short incomplete text that NCLB allegedly demanded excessive time spent on. i'm not really sure what universe it makes sense in that students who can't read the first seven paragraphs of a novel would have become much better reader if everything else had been the same but they had been making completely wack associations based on nonsense guesses for all 300 pages instead. (if you read the study it's really clear that for problematic readers, things go off the rails immediately, in a way that a good program targeted at teaching mastery of text of 500 words or less would have done something about.)

all but 3 of the students reported A's and B's in their english classes and, again, 69% of them are juniors and seniors, so like... i mean idk kudos to these professors for being like "hold up can these kids actually read?" but clearly something is wack at the college level too [in 2015] if you can make your way through nearly an entire english major without being able to read the first seven paragraphs of a dickens novel. (once again i really do encourage you to look at the qualitative samples in the study, lest you think i am being uncharitable by summarizing understandable misunderstandings or areas of confusion that may resolve themselves with further exposure to the text as "can't read.") not to mention the fact that most students could not what they had learned in previous or current english classes and when asked to name british and american authors and/or works of the nineteenth century, roughly half the sample at each college could name at most one.

the authors of the study are struck by the fact that students who cannot parse the first 3 sentences of bleak house feel very confident about their ability to read the entire novel, and discover that this seeming disconnect is resolved by the fact that these students seem to conceptualize "reading" as "skimming and then reading sparknotes." i think it's really tempting to Kids These Days this phenomenon (although again these are people who in some cases have now been in the workforce for a decade) and categorize it as laziness or a lack of effort, but i think that there is, as i described above, a real and sincere confusion over what "reading" is in which this makes a certain logical sense because it's not like they have some store of actual reading experiences to compare it to. i also think it's pretty obvious looking at just how wildly severed from actual textual comprehension their readings are that these are not - or at least not entirely - students who could just work harder and master the entirety of bleak house all on their own. like i don't think you get from "charles dickens is describing a bunch of dinosaur bones actually walking the streets of london" to comfortably reading nineteenth century literature by just trying harder. i really just don't (and i say that acknowledging i personally have had students who like... were good readers if i was forcing them to work at it constantly... but i have also had students, including ones getting ready to enter college, who were clearly giving me everything they had and what they had was at the present moment insufficient). i think that speaks to a missing skillset that they don't know are missing, because they don't have any other experience of "reading" to compare it to.

just wanna highlight again that although they don't give the breakdown some of these students are not just english majors but english education majors a.k.a. the high school english teachers of tomorrow. some of them may be teaching high school english right now, in case anyone wishes to consider whether "maybe some high school english teachers can't read the first seven paragraphs of bleak house?" should be kept in mind when we discuss present-day educational ills.

[rotagnus]

eye contactship (why you're drawn to them) reading.

a little bit of information about your situation and why you like this person...a little bit about how they feel 4 u, if they do.

i feel like i've left u guys waiting on this forever and it's FINALLY HERE. enjoy, babes 💗 happy mother's day to anyone celebrating!! mwah!! 🩷

p1.

i feel like you guys are full of sorrow recently 4 some reason. so to clarify that this is your pile, i would guess that you've been experiencing a sense of loss. like the feeling of going to a mall or a city or a big place all alone for the first time in a while and it strikes you that the world is damn HUGE. maybe a feeling of things changing, but you don't think it's in a positive light. you guys are introspective and probably introverted, with a strong connection to your hobbies, or even mother earth or deities/your religion.

as for the person you're asking about, i'd say that they do notice you. you represent something specific to them; maybe you have a consistent fashion style they associate with you, or a certain hairstyle; you're the model of a specific aspect for them. maybe alternative or you have cute accessories! i don't think that they hate you, but this person bonds based off of friendships and deep connections, so obviously, if this is just an eyecontactship, they haven't formed that with you.

you're being asked to have patience and to get out of this mindset that's chanting they'retheonethey'retheone in the back of your mind. baby, you limit your options the moment you choose that this person is yours. ask yourself why you like them; do they remind you of a toxic pattern, of home (which isn't always a good thing)? or do they make you feel calm? the universe is telling me to tell you to think about WHYYY you're so drawn to them.

p2.

ahahahaha my idealizers hello babies. so the point is, a lot of you guys are painfully self-aware that you want this person for a specific reason, and you're already puttin' on your analyzing glasses and structuring a wall around your heart to prevent any pain from coming. tell me, do you ever let yourself feel joy? many of you probably grew up in a household where this feeling of peace was associated with a specific figure, and it truly ripped you apart. you were young and innocent and naive but became overly strict with who you let into your life. your heart is closed off. however, this person makes you feel...different. they're a sweetheart and they wanna be sweet to you, awww. you symbolize opposites to them; you guys are probably different in specific ways.

for a lot of you, this person seems to symbolize safety, or whatever you perceive as joy, protection, happiness. a lot of you have never felt true peace, even though you convinced yourself you know what it is...but sometimes we think that what we have is something it's not. you're so used to giving things up and this person, in a way, allows you to step into this specific pattern. always reaching out, giving.

i think that there's def potential with this person, but you have a lot of wounds you gotta heal, darling. all that pain inside you? it prevents you from receiving. you're approached and immediately shy away. 'little bit' by lykke li, y'know? listen to that song, it's the whole vibe of this reading. you guys need to open your heart, truly, but also stop caring so much. your mind runs in loops because you're terrified of feeling true things, because it's just so much. baby steps. don't stay in this boundary just because you're scared of reciprocation. this person doesn't hate you, and in fact, i would say they have pretty positive feelings for you. contrasting you in all the best ways.

p3.

you guys are going THROUGH ITTTT. you feel like you're the darkness and everything around you is so dark too, and that everyone else is just a distant star. you guys always paint people brighter than they are. guys...listen, you are the STAR. i know you're like omgomg what does this person think about me? right now, but c'mon. the star AND the sun popped up. you guys are fucking angels and you refuse to see it. your energy is a fucking BLESSING. treat it as such. you're hella strong, because i know life's been throwing shit at you for the past while, but...you have to step up. stop lowering your standards and settling. stop being humble and realize that life is ready to give you gifts and the whole fucking world, as long as you realize that you, my love, ARE the world.

as for what this person feels for you, i know you guys know what they do. whether they like you or dislike you or whatever, you guys are deeply attuned to what other people feel, so i would suggest you trust your gut. make sure that YOU view them with a level-headed lens. one of the oracle cards i pulled out says 'cracked open. it's happening for you, not to you.' so for your whole situation...honey, i know it'll bring good things. i know that a lot of you were like 'wow i'm so happy i haven't been this happy in a while' then BAM you fell down and broke your wings. baby, it'll get better. i know you can't see it now because your heart aches, but girl. let me TELL YOU.

fuel all that energy and anger you have into making a better life for yourself. this isn't a safe energy to keep in your chest and of course life's gonna hold people back from you when they use you and abuse you and fill you with self-hatred and anger. you need to clean out the weeds. honey, you will meet a person who loves you like you're their whole world. their universe. but this? this energy you're in right now? you're not in a safe place to receive. create your world. realize what you want and stop settling for less. this is a new beginning and the choices you make right now are important. darling, you won't be alone forever. i promise you.

[zafirreja111]

So, I've been trying to give this random Sans a meaningful backstory and personality for days, but my brain just wouldn't work and I couldn't think of anything interesting. Luckily, today I somehow had enough imagination to use this as an idea, and this rudimentary concept was born:

[!This information may change later!]

About The Random Sans:

Sans' personality is split into two parts for some reason. His silly self and his serious self. While his silly self is the one who usually controls his body (because it costs him less energy), his serious self can only come out when he uses his main magic. (When his eyes flash yellow and blue.) The necklace he wears around his neck blocks the half of himself that is not in control. If the necklace is not specifically near him, he cannot use his power and cannot switch with his other self. 

Origin: 

Sans has no Au or backstory, he just appeared in a forest. However, his confused state leads him to believe he has amnesia and no memory of his past, which is why he wanders through AUs hoping to find some clue to his non-existent past. 

About his two sides:

His silly side is the one that mainly controls the body. At that time, his necklace is blue and yellow, and his eyes are two white stars. He is clumsy and tells a lot of jokes, often getting himself into trouble for stupid decisions. 

He can only switch to his serious side when he uses his main magic. His necklace is black at that time, and his left eye flashes blue and yellow. He is quite, tries to get the best out of a situation, and sometimes overthinks things.

Rarely, but in certain cases, the two halves can merge.

Small information(?):

- He'll eat any stupid plant he finds delicious. Even the ones that are poisonous and he'll regret eating them later. He'll do it again.

- His orientation skills are sucks.

- His two halves can communicate with each other, but he doesn't do it much because he finds it weird. 

✧˖

That's all for now. I don't know how to write a character description, sorry. I know it might seem like a lazy idea and maybe more could have been done with this great character design, but my brain is still foggy right now and I like this idea so I thought I'd share it with this drawing. :>

Thank you so much everyone for all the feedback! ❤️ I'm happy so many people liked my Sans design fot my latest drawing. I honestly didn't expect everyone to like it so much, especially since there wasn't even a description at the time, but it was a pleasant surprise for me. 💕

Sorry if the English is sloppy. Unfortunately, Google Translate and my questionable English skills can only do so much at a time, but I hope it's still fairly clear and understandable, even if it's not perfect. 

(Also, check out my last reblog if you want, there's another story idea there that I didn't come up with but I really love. ;] )

[blood-orange-juice]

I realised I have a problem with the "Childe has cPTSD" idea that has been getting popularity in fandom, but it's probably more because of my gripe as a psych professional with the concept of cPTSD in general.

It's an understudied disorder and it's not yet in the DSM-V. Therapists use the term because it's better than nothing (they have to treat people regardless of whether we have a comprehensive theory of how humans function) but as it is now it simply clumps together too many things.

It started with a very reasonable thought that prolonged exposure to moderately stressful events can be just as harmful as One Huge Trauma, and also that the effects or prolonged exposure to stress will differ from only experiencing something once.

Sadly, the most common scenario in which a Western person (the type that has access to therapy and gets to talk about it online) can get cPTSD is child abuse. This means in the cases that are studied and discussed cPTSD response to prolonged stress is mixed with developmental trauma (all kinds of insufficient parenting and a child's needs not being met), attachment trauma (not having a stable relationship with a caretaker at a very early age when attachment strategies are formed), relational trauma (any trauma gotten in relationships at any age) and just general reaction to abuse (and all the damage to agency and self-worth that comes from it).

cPTSD of a person who came back from a war will differ a lot from cPTSD of a person who was raised by an abusive parent. There are similarities, sure, and it's important to recognise that a bad family situation can be just as damaging as being in an active war zone (in that sense the term has done more good than harm), but these two people won't have the same self-concepts and coping strategies.

The concept of cPTSD can be very useful if you are trying to understand what is happening to you personally or to explain it to your therapist (or to find a trauma-informed therapist), it isn't bad. But you can't say "this character has cPTSD" and derive meaningful predictions about his behaviour or self-image from it. It's too much of an umbrella term.

So, back to our boy. Bad things only started to happen to him at 14 and it's different from someone being consistently traumatised from an early age.

Does he have hypervigilance, bizarre strategies of self-regulation, at least some amount of dissociation, occasional attention problems and intolerance to helplessness? Yeah, probably, his lifestyle would do that to pretty much anyone. Prolonged stress just does that, doesn't matter how badass someone is. Some negative beliefs about himself are also likely. Difficulty with connecting with others is a given (everyone else lives in a different reality, how would he even begin to connect).

Does he have relational trauma? Also yes, we all do. Some justified guilt and anger over how things went? Not necessary but very possible. Some irrational guilt for things he couldn't control? Again, not necessary but I could roll with that (it's a common response to helplessness. guilt is easier to stomach than the loss of control).

Would he behave like a child abuse victim, thinking himself completely worthless and constantly doubting and pitying himself? I don't think so. He looks like a person who has never been abused in his life. It's very fun to write and I understand the appeal of it (I'm probably occasionally guilty of that too) but it's simply not how he's portrayed in canon.

He wouldn't think of himself like a child of narcissistic parents would either (having to be the best to prove his right to exist). He was long past the age when he could have gotten that type of trauma when Abyss and the Fatui happened to him. Also his resilience comes from somewhere and I think it's from having a loving family. Sure, it wasn't a perfect family (I have a lot of questions for them) and now it's irreparably messed up even more but he does look like a person who was loved as a kid.

[lemotmo]

Not to doom, just a genuine question: asking Ostark about buddie and having Ostark saying that Eddie is straight wouldn’t be just a way to shut down Buddie by remembering the audience and stating that nothing can happen since Eddie is straight?

Well no. For many many many reasons:

A. If the goal was to shut down Buddie they wouldn't even allow questions about it in the first place. Why talk about something that isn't even on the radar for them?

B. The general audience isn't as obsessed with 911 as we are. For some of them a queer Eddie would be unexpected. So why mention Buddie in the first place if the GA wasn't even thinking about it? Why actively make people think about something you don't want them to think about in the first place? That would be so counterproductive.

C. Oliver would never add the 'we'll see what happens there' or the 'If the story were to go there, I'm up for it.' if he knew it wasn't going canon. That is not the way that man works. He once stopped talking about Buddie full stop, because he didn't want to give people false hope. This was when the show was still on FOX.

Then when it moved to ABC, he suddenly and freely started mentioning Buddie again.

Same with Ryan by the way. He has given the exact same scripted answer that if the story would go there, he'd be up for it.

If they wanted to shut it all down? They would just say something like 'Yeah, the fans really seem to like us together like that, but I'm afraid that it'll never happen. Sorry guys! But Buck and Eddie are just good friends. That is all.'

D. They would have also pushed the BT agenda more. They would have allowed GMA to ask questions about T and if Buck would ever get together with him again.

If Buddie was never the plan? They would have definitely done promo for BT and they would have given them a more compelling storyline. A bit like Tarlos in Lone Star. They got interviews and a photoshoot.

Oliver would have had to interact more with L as well. They would have had interviews discussing their relationship etc.

But none of that happened. From the very beginning, Oliver straight up ignored the T of it all and only talked about Buck's bisexuality. The show knew and he knew that BT was never meant to last in the first place. It was a ploy to make Buddie happen in the long run.

D. The narrative of the show right now. They have had Buck question if he is in love with Eddie twice now. Every single time his answer that Eddie is 'straight'. He never simply says 'Eddie is my best friend. No way! That would feel wrong.' or something like that.

Eddie has mentioned he is straight as well in a very queer-coded episode. Everything in that episode was pointing towards the fact that he is in fact 'not as straight as he thinks he is'.

E. Oliver and Ryan doing 'silly' interviews together. The thirst tweet thing and the other Buzzfeed interview. It's just silly fun that shows off their chemistry.

No no no Nonny! This is happening! It's going canon.😄 I don't know the exact timeline they're going with here, but I do expect something Buddie-wise to happen in the finale. It'll be part of a character-driven emotional cliffhanger to tie us over to season 9. Personally, I'm thinking about mutual feelings realisations. But who knows at this point? 🤷‍♀️

I don't care. I'm sat for that finale AND season 9. 🤗

[bleue-flora]

Something that I see a lot is the reasoning that Dream’s motive is unity. That staged finale was about uniting the server against him to bring them together even if he couldn’t be apart of that. And honestly I’m just not sure that’s the case. For starters, in the big moments when he talks about his reasoning he doesn’t mention unity he mentions together, he mentions family, he mentions team.

[from early days]

“We just wanted to have a good, safe, productive team. And when one person has a tyranny over everybody else—that keeps killing them, then you can’t have a team.” [clip]

“Listen, from now on we’re going have a civilization, okay? That lives in harmony and… and there’s no ruler. Not even me—not even anybody.” [clip]

[Punz and Dream planning]

“Always, the goal has just been that—it’s all one united server that everybody follows the same rules, there’s no countries, there’s no—you know, any of this. It’s just… One giant like—family, right?” [clip]

[prison]

“I just wanted to… I just wanted to bring the server together. Have it be a happy family, you know?” [clip]

[finale]

“Once we know everything, we—we’re able to live and everyone can be invincible and everyone can live together and be in harmony and—and not have to worry about death or pain or anything, then it’ll be worth it. The ends justify the means.” [clip]

“I want everyone to able to live and be happy and together… and you’ve—you’ve ruined that—you’ve ruined that yourself. You’re the one who separates everyone!” [clip]

And I know for some people unity and together might seem synonymous, but in this context I don’t think they are. I think it’s important to realize that Dream wanted people to not be divided, he wanted them to be a happy family, but families aren’t always united. They don’t always agree, they aren’t always peaceful, they don’t always have the same goals or agenda or beliefs, but a close family always makes up in the end and when all is said and done, generally gets along and is there for each other.

Additionally, the way I’ve always understood it was that Dream didn’t want peace, he wanted people to do the right thing [clip] and he wanted people to be happy which means that conflicts where people are getting upset opposes that. Dead pets, items not being returned, houses being burnt, people being insulted, and offenders refusing to simply apologize [clip] that tends to cause a conflict without resolution that leaves a lasting divide and unhappiness, which goes against Dream’s goal. But I don’t think he was against violence or wars as a whole, after all those happen at the beginning, when things were still simple. The point was that people stayed as a whole happy or content and as long as no one got too upset it was fine.

To keep people happy and safe, Dream also needed to prevent any one person from holding the power, because they would abuse it and use it against people, which we see happen over and over again. This is one of the reasons why he had a problem with Wilbur’s self appointed presidency, it’s why he kills George early on and takes his stuff when he became op before everyone else, it is why he kills Tubbo’s villagers. He didn’t want anyone to be too overpowered and then use that power to harm others. Dream considered himself the mediator and one to balance out the sides, the one to make sure people had their stuff back when all was said and done, the one to help people get revenge for their dead pet. Yes, he broke the very rules he made, which people love to point out makes him a hypocrite and therefore his gripe with Tommy has no footing, but notice what he says in the finale:

“You break all the rules. Tommy, there wasn’t even that many rules. They were simple things: respect others, don’t destroy things. You broke everything—every rule.” [clip]

“Respect others,” that’s the first thing he mentions, because that’s the most important. That’s the one that Tommy broke that bothered Dream the most. It wasn’t really about the stealing or the killing or griefing, after all George and Sapnap did that too. No, it was the lack of respect he had for the people he hurt that bothered Dream the most. It was that lack of respect which led people to be unhappy even when the war was over and sustaining that divide even after the war, which goes against the civilization Dream strived for.

It’s not about unity, it’s about the opposite of exclusion. It’s about Sapnap and Punz who were both friends with clingy duo, but not able to join L’manberg because they are American. It was the divide and separation. Like Ranboo who because of nations and politics struggled to be friends with both Techno and L’manberg.

Dream didn’t want people to be truly united in a cause nor did he want true peace - the absence of conflict and chaos. because you only get those by enforcing them through dictatorship and oppression when you force everyone to have the same opinion and obey. But Dream didn’t want to be a tyrant, that’s one of the reasons why he kept handing the power to a king. He wanted everyone to live in harmony by doing the right thing themselves and he thought that if he could keep the server from splitting that they would.

So then, the reason I think he put himself in prison and planned staged finale, wasn’t about uniting the server even if that’s against himself, but because it was the only way he could see a path to be allowed and accepted back into society. That if he served his time in prison maybe they would see him as a person again and think he got better and let him out, which I’ve talked more about [here] and [here].

“Maybe—maybe I’ll be better and then you’ll let me out.” [clip]

He wanted a family. As Tommy points out in the finale: he just wanted to have friends. He didn’t want to be alone. So it doesn’t make sense for his goal to be a self sacrificial move to unite everyone against him for the sake of unity, he wanted to bring people together into a happy society again, where they spend the afternoon fishing and playing hide and seek, not wars and executions and politics. But he wanted to be apart of that society and family too, because he didn’t want to be alone. Honestly, he probably wanted to be friends with everyone, but the division was preventing that, the propaganda was preventing that, and so prison became the only option he could see to undo that. To allow him back into the family that he was trying to keep together. That’s what staged finale was about - protection for him and Punz and the opportunity of reconciliation [post]. If he really just wanted unity then he would’ve have been fairly pleased with Doomsday, where most everyone sided against his side. If he wanted the whole server against him, then staged finale was an abysmal success, as he points out to Sam in Daedalus plenty of people like Techno weren’t involved. But of course it was never about unity because that doesn’t make sense, it was about friends, and family, bringing people together so that no one was alone and excluded, forming a simple happy community again…

[redhoodfucker69]

okay I used to work for a pharmaceutical manager. basically it was a service that directly managed pharmaceutical benefits for insurance companies and also had its own mail order pharmacy. I was a call center representative and I won't get into it but I basically had a mental breakdown and completely ghosted before I got fired. that's beside the point. (people are seriously not meant to be expected to take 90 calls in a fucking eight hour shift. that's like five minutes per call and half of the time it takes five minutes just to get through the fucking HIPAA verification).

in any case. I was the first level customer service agent. the one you talked to so I could figure out what was needed, if I could resolve it, and what dedicated team was necessary to resolve it if I couldn't. dealing with both insurance and pharmacy at the same time meant I needed to be able to answer a lot of difficult questions, especially since we also had a specialty pharmacy on the side that dealt with more complex and highly expensive medications. sometimes it ended up I couldn't answer any questions at all, nor could my company, and I had to waste thirty fucking minutes figuring out who in their actual insurance company I needed to get on the line with so they could talk to them. nightmare job. in any case, the majority of questions and tasks I fielded had to do with the mail order pharmacy.

we tended to use USPS as our dedicated mail company except in special situations like overnight orders or specific refrigerated medications. even without a pharmacy tech license, I was qualified to place those orders. most of our callers were the elderly, because older folks prefer using the phone and talking to people and don't like ordering via automated system. (i don't blame them, when I refill prescriptions, I just jump directly to speak to representative bc who the hell has time to fight with a system that may or may not refill the wrong thing when I can talk to a person, and those systems OFTEN fill the wrong thing, I know from experience, especially when you're on the same medication but adjusting dosages and there's like three separate dosages with qualified refills). so, I would refill. a lot. of medications for old folks.

I cannot express to you based on my experience the absolute importance of having USPS functioning as it should and not privatized. many of these rural communities have no local pharmacy, are miles away from big towns that have them, and are entirely dependent on mail order pharmacies that refill medications every three months on a schedule. there are so many elderly folks stranded out there that have never lived in a big city in their life and rely on their kids living in larger towns to take them to doctor appointments, or dedicated caretakers, or just carpooling. they'll stack all of their appointments for the same day and all hop in a car to go to the city. they need these mail order pharmacies.

mail order pharmacies typically rely on USPS for a reason: privatized parcel delivery companies will often not serve to tiny rural communities. if you're living on a dirt road, you're shit out of luck for delivery. sure, there's some small towns with a physical location, or close enough to a town with a physical location they'll deliver. but not super often, and it also depends. if there's no physical location, but they still do in town deliveries, they'll often refuse to drop off a package that requires a signature due to the cost of whatever is in the package. why? because they don't want to constantly play signature tag with someone where there isn't an immediately available office to go back to with the package. and a lot of these packages require signatures because medications are fucking expensive. so if you want to get your medicine, you gotta drive 30 minutes to over an hour to wherever the hell your package is anyways.

that's where USPS comes in. because it's not for profit, it delivers everywhere, and even if a town doesn't have a post office bc it's got such a tiny population, the next town over will, and they'll deliver.

I cannot express this enough. privatizing the USPS will absolutely fucking kill these small communities, and may actually kill some people before the communities die off. I cannot tell you how many times I had to field calls where they only called once they ran out of maintenance medications waiting on a new batch, even though there's a fairly large buffer zone when ordering directly from the pharmacy where you should have a handful of days, up to a week, leftover when your new medication comes in. they will straight up wait for it to run out before they make the call. combine that with a chaotic post office and it will get out of control fast. they're stubborn and don't want to call their kids or caretakers to go pick up an emergency supply from the nearest pharmacy. I had to sweet talk a LOT of old folks into getting an emergency supply, and not every agent will do that, and even if they do, they won't always be successful. I wasn't always successful. one time I had to talk an old lady into getting an emergency supply for her anti rejection medication for her fucking liver transplant. I wasn't even required nor trained to tell people emergency supplies were something they could get when on the mail order program. in fact, I was told in training I could only say yes when asked the question, and I wasn't supposed to bring it up, bc insurance companies are fucking ghouls that would rather people die than spend a little extra money. many agents will go by the book and NOT bring it up. I didn't want someone's death on my hands, so I made sure to always tell them.

privatizing the postal service will ACTUALLY kill people, and postal workers know this. they talk to people on their regular routes. they get to know them. they see them every day. they're even more chatty with retirees and old folks because they're someone familiar to talk to and a lot of old folks are isolated. they know DAMN well not only their jobs are on the line, but people's lives are at stake here. they know the ins and outs of politics and cost saving measures with privatized parcel delivery services like FedEx and UPS. they know privatizing the post office will inevitably end in some of those old folks they see almost every day and chat to dying and them losing their jobs and benefits. I guarantee you a lot of the people getting laid off in the first round will be the older drivers that have been with the post office for 20, 30 years now, running the same routes and watching the same folks grow old. the drivers know that too.

so. yeah. this is gonna actually kill people. don't let the post office get privatized. if you see these protests in your city, swing by. you can protest with them, or if you don't have time, drop off unopened cases of bottled water. it's getting hot out here. keep your postal workers hydrated. maybe drop off some donuts for blood sugar. support unions.

[zynxsone]

Trollhunters: Rise of the Titans. A review and why it's an abomination to the series.

I don’t know why I just decided to write a review now but I still am doing it. Original review is a tad bit long so I shortened it.

First of all, I would gladly say that Trollhunters, 3Below, and Wizards have been an amazing part of my childhood. I started watching the show in 2016 and I absolutely loved it. It excited me that 3Below had come after, along with Wizards in the making. When I heard that there will be a movie to complete the series, I was excited! — only to be disappointed in the outcome. 

While I loved certain parts of the movie, everything else was badly written and executed. First of all, let’s talk about Aja. She was so out of character in the movie, as if she was a totally different person; she would never leave anyone in danger even if she did not know them, especially Claire who is a friend. Aja may be Queen now, but she is no coward and definitely no jerk. 

“Jim, it’s too late, the bridge is about to fall!” Hello? Didn’t she basically try to use her own life core after finding out that Morando had just destroyed half of Arcadia and that it was too late? She would not choose running away as an option, never. She is a warrior.

Eli's appearance was not needed, but I still love him regardless. Though, he did not play a huge part but was used as an emotional anchor for Steve, basically. 

The inclusion of the Mpreg subplot felt completely unnecessary. It’s unclear whether it was meant for comedic appeal or simply to put reason to Krel’s dislike to romance? but either way, it added nothing meaningful to the story. It wasn’t even a central detail, and its impact was negligible. Additionally, Aja and Steve's complete lack of concern for their newly born children—who essentially is about to vanish when Jim chose to go back in time—was baffling and emotionally hollow. Their reaction (or lack thereof) undermined any emotional weight the scene could have had. His pregnancy had literally more attention than the building up of the characters and the plot.]

Steve had potential to be used in the movie, a more heroic part. But the writers decided to shove him off and be a forced inclusion and it was disturbing to see. But at least it made a number of people laugh. We could have had a scene where the concept of Creepslayerz is back, but NO!!! We get teenage Male pregnancy instead, a detailed one.

 I found this movie deeply disappointing, especially since it wasn’t directed by Guillermo del Toro, the one who started it all.

So many of the deaths felt unnecessary—especially Nomura’s. Killing off such an important figure in Jim’s life without any real weight or closure was incredibly frustrating. And Strickler’s death? That, too, lacked the emotional depth it deserved. If the writers were aiming for an impactful character death, it would have made more sense to choose Blinky—Jim’s mentor and father figure—whose loss would have carried a much deeper emotional resonance. Draal’s sacrifice worked because it was meaningful and justified within the story. In contrast, Nomura’s death felt careless and hollow. It was as if she were treated like a disposable side character, despite having a significant connection to Jim—especially during his time in the Darklands where they started to have a platonic connection. Her bond with him mattered, and the way her story ended just didn’t reflect that.

Back to Strickler’s part, he really died for nothing. His sacrifice had no use since Skrael’s titan was indestructible by just using some few pieces of bomb. They should have known that bombs will do nothing as the titans–they're made of magic. Him choosing to sacrifice himself was not a bad choice, he would do anything to protect Barbara and now Jim, but it was done unprofessionally.

The mention of Jim’s father after his sacrifice was so random while at that, it was absurd. 

SO many sacrifices, yet none even have the significance they deserve and the writer just shrug it off because hey time is important

Oh, and by the way,

And let’s not forget one of the biggest plot holes: they literally created a fusion of Akiridion tech and magic that could block out magic itself—and no one thought to use it against the Titans? Seriously? Only Toby remembered the artifact, but by that point, they were all on the verge of death. That kind of oversight just makes the characters look incompetent and undermines the stakes entirely. This is bad writing. Like yes, characters can forget their own creations. But this one? The one they made specifically for the Arcane order? The one that removes their magic?? Stop.

There are so MANY plot holes in just one movie, it’s hard to process.

Also, why is Jim suddenly using a serrator—a weapon he’s never used before to fight a demigod made of fire? They could have at least shown that he struggled to use something he has never wielded before. 

Seriously, WHO wrote Jim in this movie? Because I have a gift for you, and it’s ticking. Jim was completely useless in this film. He’s already accepted that he is the Trollhunter—”amulet or not.” So why are we revisiting this question? Yes, the amulet’s rebuild was a nice touch, but Jim constantly went back and forth about whether he’s still the Trollhunter, quoting "but without the amulet am I still the troll hunter?” just feels unnecessary and repetitive. It undermines the growth his character went through, turning him into someone who can’t seem to accept his role despite everything he’s been through. Yes, him being anxious and questioning is his character, but we have already gone through this before. His personality has been completely altered—Almost everyone included!

I liked the jailbreak scene. It made me laugh and smile to see Lucy and Ricky playing a part. [I’m so sorry but Eli absolutely had no point in showing up. He only came back as Steve’s midwife.]

Nari and Skrael’s fight lacked depth. There was barely any meaningful interaction between them beforehand to establish why their confrontation mattered beyond the surface-level conflict—Skrael’s desire to reshape the world versus Nari’s choice to protect her friends. That alone doesn’t justify the importance of their battle. The emotional stakes were weak because their relationship wasn’t explored. On top of that, so many character dynamics were either ignored or rewritten entirely, stripping away their importance to the story and one another.

But I will say that the movie did have great action scenes. But there was no teamwork when fighting Bellroc, everyone was set aside as a decoy.

Jim going back in time was my last straw. He knowingly risked everything—his loved ones, the balance of the world—just to make that speech and undo everything that had happened. He was fully aware that tampering with the past could lead to even greater danger, yet he still made that reckless choice. It undermines the growth he went through and paints him as someone willing to gamble with countless lives, including those he claimed to protect. That moment didn’t feel like a heroic sacrifice—it’s a careless, desperate rewrite.

Toby’s death was well earned, It was a heroic act.

Having Toby become the new Trollhunter is a rushed decision that obviously showed that they had no intention of continuing the franchise. Throughout the series, it was emphasized—both through dialogue and major plot points—that Jim was the Trollhunter and that it was his destiny. There was even an entire episode centered around the idea that if anyone else wielded the amulet, the world would fall into chaos.  Didn’t Merlin himself say that “My Amulet does not make mistakes.” and out of every creature he can choose, it was Jim. So why are we forcing Toby to wield daylight. This is very ridiculous.

The amulet chose Jim for a reason. By suddenly passing it on to Toby, the narrative undermines its own message—especially the core theme that “Destiny is a gift.” If it was never truly Jim’s destiny, then what was the point of all his struggles and sacrifices?

Nari was a good inclusion since she plays a big part in the movie and the entire series, but I feel like Douxie was the only well written character throughout the entire movie, but he still has flaws just like every other major character that appears in this movie. Though, he wasn’t really important in the movie. He was more of a sideline.

The two pages of a book being stuck by a sticky food was the dumbest decision to build up climax. Blinky is not that stupid to not notice that two pages are glued to each other, if so, the pages would be bulky. 

It would have made for a more decent ending if they had allowed Toby to die entirely. While it’s harsh to say, it would have added importance to the story and given Jim a much-needed emotional arc. Jim could have been forced to confront the harsh reality that he can’t save everyone, no matter how much he tries. Instead, he passes his so-called destiny to his friend, the one who he went back in time to, knowing all the huge responsibilities, hardships and death-experiencing moments he had that would now be Toby’s future. Why would he ever want this to his friend that just died a moment ago? This is so stupid, then he goes off chasing after Claire while completely aware of what Toby will go through. 

Toby wouldn’t even survive Bular in the canals. Because as it was stated, Jim only did thanks to his chef skills. Not to be offensive, Toby was in a bad shape at the beginning of the show [not that there’s anything wrong with that of course.] The writers are PRETENDING, gaslighting themselves that Toby will be exactly how Jim came to be the trollhunter. Toby has his own skills and fighting style, but he is not made to wield daylight. It completely invalidates his character and abilities as a person.

And one of the reasons how Jim was able to defeat Gunmar was because he had to SACRIFICE himself to transform into a half troll. Toby will most likely will get himself killed trying to defeat Gunmar and so will Jim, probably. Unless he has the ability to while being human. The world is screwed.

If Jim had to choose a moment to go back to, it would have made sense for him to pick the point just before the fight with Bellroc and Skrael on the train. With the knowledge he gained from experiencing the entire battle, he could have easily defeated them, avoiding the entire mess that followed. [He can actually choose a time to go back to, by the way.] This decision also seems selfish as his choice. 

Honestly, they could have defeated Bellroc without having to use the new amulet if they just remembered to use the trifurcate blaster [magic blocker].

The only good parts in this movie was the animation, cinematography, and the visuals. 

The only reason I’m giving this review two stars is because of Bellroc. Their portrayal in the movie was genuinely compelling, especially the scene where they try to manipulate Jim into abandoning the fight and fleeing to his friends—just to make it easier to seize the Heartstone. [Also a self-indulgent reason because they’ve become my favorite character.]

This was a terrible way to end the series—terribly written, atrocious even, and incredibly rushed. Even fanfictions written by 13-year-old fans have more cohesive plots than this. It’s disappointing to see a story with so much potential collapse like this. It reminded me of how I felt about How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World's ending—but at least that had meaning and had a reason WHY. Rise of the Titans doesn’t even offer that. [And ironically, both stories are canonically set in the same universe] which just makes the contrast more frustrating. It’s like Spider-Man no way home had a cheap copy of an ending. This movie was a mistake.

The ending is what makes you say: “why?”

I recommend stopping at Wizards and imagine your own ending on how they’ve come to save the world.

[rei-ismyname]

I meant to write this up earlier, got distracted.

I was meaning to ask you how you feel about the 05, if that you think they’re a compelling dynamic as a team post their original run(Post X Factor too even). One of the fascinating facts about X-men, to me, is how they nearly got the same fate as the inhumans circa the early 70s, relegated to a back forgotten corner of the universe had not claremont, cockrum and byrne stepped in.

It’s amazing to me how certainly the All New Cast replaces the 05 as the definitive X-men team in a pop culture consensus. We rarely see them all together anymore, even when X-men makes the conscious effort to go “back to basics,” like with the current X-men FTA runs.

I admit, I don’t get the same immediate understanding of the 05’s group dynamic when I read their original run, comparatively to other Lee Kirby creations of the era, with this feeling easing up by my reading of X-factor. They can feel less warm at times, and maybe that’s by design for that group specifically, I didn’t feel the same about the All New group during claremont’s run, regardless of how much bickering there was. Maybe it’s just writing of the time. Sorry if this is a ramble, I like picking your brain for x-men takes

Interesting question with a not so simple answer. Actually, that's not true. I could just say that the original run is 💩 and leave it at that, haha, but we both know I'm not going to. Generally though, I'm pretty confident in saying that if the 1963 run was the only X-Men that existed, I wouldn't care about it. It's likely I wouldn't even know about it. There's gold there (like Magneto), but you have to sift through a lot of chaff to get it. Even then, everything interesting about the book was refined by other hands or revisited.

Look at these bozos tucking Chuck in

I think one of the reasons they're so interesting is because that shared wacky, horribly traumatizing history is there. They're family, they're best friends, they're each other's ineffective support systems, they're ride or die soldiers and they've been through fucking EVERYTHING together. 62 years of hardcore paramilitary shit squeezed through a sliding timescale into only 15, growing every week with some new crisis. Dealing with only a life or death race war is a pretty good day for them on average - never mind aliens, Gods, time travelling killbots, possession, mind control, literally dying, torture, and every other thing including the kitchen sink. Who can they talk to that can actually understand? The Summers Protocols are written in their blood, protecting people who HATE them. How can these people not be intensely fucked up? So many words answering this question under the cut. 💯% rambling but it's definitely my thoughts on the O5 X-Men.

They can't, so they are. 15 year olds drafted into a forever war by a manipulative billionaire who's nearly as fucked up but pretends he's not. The school is up to code now (I mean it's a jail now but you know what I mean) and they teach real lessons, actual adults join willingly (you're 45% sure) and there's multiple telepaths around to keep Chuck in line. Newer X-Men get standardized training and are shadowed by experienced soldiers. You helped Scott formulate these protocols when you were both too traumatized to sleep one month. You're so glad that students' mental health is a priority but you worry they won't learn valuable repression skills. Bobby has the right idea, tell a joke. When people laugh it almost drowns out the particular soulless drone the Gen 1 sentinels made. Can anyone else hear that?

The Champions see like 1% of repressed X-Men trauma and wig out

These newer folks are family too but they weren't there man. It was the fucking wild west! You call home reflexively for the 250th time and your birth family is angry. 'We never had a son called Hank, stop calling us.' Why was that necessary again? Maybe the mindwipe will wear off one day. You'd ask The Professor about it but you don't want to risk demerits for disturbing his construction of death traps. Besides, you're studying Quantum Physics to maybe help survive fighting Magneto later. Why did you think about him? He's so terrifying, that look in his eye. Maybe you'll talk to Scott about it, but he's running the day's 400th simulation of your gruesome deaths. Bobby would just joke about it, but there's a sadness in his eyes that you recognise. This ... dream feels further away each day, your own dreams are much closer and they're always the same. Mutant/human relations just get worse and worse - you've wasted your life, and you're training a 10 year old with horns to follow you. You can't remember their name either. Was it Bong or Bing or? No they died the last time the school blew up. FUCK ! 😭

Yeeting bowling balls during free play was day 1 shit. 'Testing his reflexes.'

Okay hopefully I've made my point. They are beyond fucked up with terrible coping skills. Things you'd learn from family, friends or teachers, but your Messiah complex emotionally unavailable God King Chuck just recommended a codependent relationship. You can talk to the rest of the O5 (if they're alive and in control of their own minds) but they're just as fucked up. There's nobody else - they all want to kill you. And it. Never. Ever. Ends. Seriously. Fuck. Me. It just keeps getting worse. They've got so much history that every facet of their origins has multiple contradictory accounts. They're a beautiful mess found family that love each other so much but mostly don't know how to express it, let alone do healthy conflict resolution.

I didn't read the X-Men comics sequentially, so by the time I even knew what X-Men was the O5 had been mythologised in and out of universe. My baseline perception started there entwined with pop culture osmosis and as I read back through it all the context radically shifted around, especially the early stories or remixes of them. LBR, the 1963 run kinda sucks, lol. I love it, of course, but if you filed the X-Men's name off it I'd hate it. In a big way it's a historical artifact. The Rosetta Stone and Stonehenge except sixties camp. The time dilation just makes it ... wackier. I hate that word, not as much as zany, but I really don't like it. Let me explain.

Take the social and ethical values the 1963 characters have in their first run - they're not especially sympathetic or even heroic in many ways. Their politics is vapid, social awareness negligible, zero class consciousness. They mostly look better than the people they fight especially the alleged mutant liberationist who's a stylish yet run of the mill megalomaniac. A budget Doctor DOOM - though there's massive potential. I don't care what Stan Lee said retroactively - I don't buy an all-WASP pro-establishment group who beat up their fellow mutants as inspired by any progressive movement period, let alone civil rights. At best there's Red Scare aesthetic and vague iconography coming from the centre of both sidesism. That's on the page, that's the blueprint from which it all came.

The best and the worst. Magneto doing stuff and sex pests plus Drill Sergeant Chuck.

The characters are so popular and iconic that many books and flashbacks have been set in that time period. The Hidden Years, as Hickman so aptly put it in HoxPox. That alone (not to mention other media) makes it ripe for interpretation, speculation, and variations on the theme. Every time it's revisited there's a new angle, simply by virtue of time having passed. The X-Men were founded in 1963, but it's always fifteen years ago relative to the present. The O5's values (and technology level) are updated and/or deconstructed to reflect that, which in turn alters every dynamic. For example, instead of the X-Men being Mad Men-esque raging sex pests with eyes bulging out and tongue on the floor when Jean shows up, they're more realistic middle class teenagers to reflect that WOMEN ARE PEOPLE. Bobby's hypersexual performance is the most extreme but we know what he's repressing. Where 60s kids were gullible bootlicking fucks that bend to any authority (I assume - if you're a 60s child, no offence), no matter how unreasonable - X-Men: Season One showed Jean to be deeply suspicious of Xavier's motives, methods, and mission with the others not far behind her - the first instinct being to get far away from this bald lying maniac and his idiot plans. During the Magneto fight from issue #1 she's thinking 'we are NOT ready for this and someone is going to get hurt.' Chuck responds with 'duly noted.' She calls Chuck out about wiping minds and running a secret paramilitary group instead of a school and he has to try to present a coherent ideology. S1, and many other adaptations, stress that this is not normal, it's dangerous as fuck and there's massive question marks around whether these children are capable of consenting. Many such cases, etc. No, really, there's been so many remixes and additions to the HY and I love them. Even in the 60s and early 70s they'd break up or join other teams, show up in weird adventures with the rest of Marvel, retcon stuff from a few issues ago. First Class, Origins, Season One, and on and on.

Not really a school, you're in my army now.

Which interpretation is 'canon'? They're (mostly) deliberately incompatible so we have to decide for ourselves, piecing together a mosaic with drastically different tiles. We all have our own, likely influenced heavily by which corner/s of fandom we're in or the analysis we consume. I suspect we mostly choose what feels good for our faves, and I don't exclude myself from that. Adaptation theory holds that Siegel and Shuster defined the superhero genre with Superman and every work since that is an adaptation to some degree. Without being over literal in that I want to apply it to the X-Men separated by author/creator. Each adaptation of the X-teams is influenced by what came before, but the best are not beholden. Keep in mind that while Stan Lee's name was credited for a lot of stories in that era, it's unlikely he actually wrote them all, or by himself. The Hidden Years was built by many hands, they're just ... hidden.

Wein and Cockrum went big with Giant-Size, with Chuck recruiting globally to rescue the O5 under Cyclops' command then merged the two. Claremont came on board and adapted the Hidden Years formula into a sprawling epic with the Mutant Metaphor running through it. He'd open up the past with flashbacks but more importantly he retconned Magneto into a three dimensional antagonist. Moustache twirling VILLAIN!!! self identifying as evil becomes a deeply traumatized man struggling with the power to prevent another holocaust getting a little too committed to the bit. That retroactively makes us view the Hidden Years differently, if not entirely as the work of unreliable narrators. His years-long arc culminated in disavowing his actions and submitting to trial, then atoning through promising his loser husband he'd raise the new kids - The New Mutants. You can see the HY formula updated and tweaked into something far more interesting - an adaptation. The original run is adapted, but the characters from it stuck around too. On and on that went, decade after decade, until Bendis hit on yanking the O5 out of the HY and into the present. It kinda changed everything for me while exposing newer readers to the oldest X-Men.

Prepare for deconstruction. You'll hate it.

I truly laud Bendis and everyone else involved for revisiting their kitschy beginnings - bringing them to the eternal present away from Chuck and putting them in the audience surrogate position under the microscope. I'd argue that decision and execution reshaped the O5 , de- and re-constructing them in a modern environment. It had a lot of problems but it did wonders for the O5. The films had already done their own thing, but they didn't push the comics forward. They might have brought new eyes to see Patrick Stewart or Hugh Jackman in the art but the ideas flow one way 99.999% of the time - from comics to other media. House of M shook things up for everyone, but most of all it split the O5 again along militant lines. One thing led to another and the Phoenix upended their lives again with Scott killing Chuck in AvX. Scott was penitent but didn't slow down ideologically and the other living O5 had had enough - especially Hank. He time travelled and bought the young O5 forward to 'stop mutant genocide', then lost control of the situation. They weren't paragons from a better time who'd fix everything, they were just messed up kids and they had their own ideas.

A lot of fanfic tropes are used in the teen O5 conceit and I don't think that's a coincidence or a bad thing. Interestingly, instead of being a fix-it or alternate universe they're brought to us to suffer under the weight of expectations, their own legend/infamy, and saddled with the existential horror of predetermination. Predestination. Not just 'you will do these things' but 'the universe will blow up if you deviate even a little bit.' These legends walked among the present day X-Men, but as they were at the very beginning. Awkward teens. Here's the cliff notes on the 'truth' they learn and their reactions.

Beast - turns himself blue and furry, still has a crush on Jean, and becomes an irresponsible gonzo science MF. Can't believe it, freaks TF out, eventually learns magic.

Angel - can't get a straight answer for quite some time, eventually meets his amnesiac cloudcuckoolander shirtless self, cracks over the boatload of trauma waiting for him and tries to run.

Bobby - his two clown selves HATE each other despite being very similar, and spend most of the time on the back foot. Grows up a little then iis forcibly outed and does the same to his present self while knowing that he'll have to live the lie for decades.

Jean - super uncomfortable with the perfect dead Jean everyone has in their head and the legacy, learns she's got exactly one person in her romantic future and he killed Chuck. Everyone wants to either fuck her or kill her. Has multiple kids but also doesn't.

Scott - Learns he becomes the new Magneto and kills Chuck, flees in the face of Logan wanting to kill him/everyone treating him like he's adult Scott Summers. Has multiple kids who hate him and everything is upside down.

WTF Logan. Valid reaction, kids.

So these sixties ciphers (yeah I said it - Stan Lee wasn't a good character writer most of the time) come to the future under false pretence of saving it and they freak out. The social positions are flipped and the legendary progenitors of the X-Men institution just seem like loser teenagers. They have weak powers and everyone is disappointed with them one way or another - the original X-Men deconstructed and laid bare. It's decided they go back immediately and what do they do? They say 'fuck this shit, we came here to save the world and that's what we're going to do. Destiny can go fuck itself.' Their real superpowers of coping with endless mind bending horror and existential despair kick in.

Then we get years of reconstruction - breaking down exactly what makes them heroes and legends, but having them earn it as outsiders amongst outsiders. The pedestal is rejected because nobody deserves that shit. They're not perfect, they're relatable and yes, they are pretty fucking special. But they're still just kids and shouldn't really be here, doing paramilitary shit. They hold a mirror up to the absent Xavier and his dodgy fucking practices, to Logan and his Madonna/Whore delusions, to the school that inexplicably bears Jean's name. They do the same to adult Scott because they find it so hard to believe he's this mutant antichrist etc - and realise he's not that at all - they were lied to.

That bit is important because the X-Men assimilationist institution was in a post AvX reactionary phase united in hatred of Scott - who's ruining everything. It's a group delusion and the kids quickly see it doesn't match reality. They're shocked at how badly they failed their primary mission AND at how passive the X-Men are in the face of atrocities. They gradually learn about the details of their future and in doing so deconstruct the X-Men in general. Significantly, they grow wayyyy beyond the demerit-fearing yes men Chuck moulded them into and they actually get to be teenagers. Somewhat normal ones. They spend time on other teams, they kiss new people, they live outside the bubble of secrecy Xavier insisted on. Significantly, they're all treated as equally important characters and this undercurrent of sadness at the dead or no longer friends members weighs on them.

Xavier is viewed appropriately maybe for the first time as their initial shock at his underhandedness and secrecy blends with sympathising with his position. It IS easier to force people to do things. Way easier. It's heroic to choose not to, to be better, braver. They're very surprised about this but it doesn't take long for them to believe it. Characters in the present even make jokes about how shady he is. Compared to the eager beavers hanging off his every word in the 1963 run and beyond, it's night and day. So again, which is 'canon?' They can't both be, or can they?

They show the world why they are the O5. Not because of some regressive rose-tinted view of the past - because a bald billionaire chose them and they chose heroism over and over despite it ruining their lives. It was a position no children should have been put in, and that's really fucked up, but the struggle is real. They're special but you can be too. You're making history RN - they just did it first and oh boy have they suffered for it. That's why they should be revered - because they did it first. Their adult selves also show the mistakes made. Not one of them is happy or even stable and that shouldn't be surprising. They aren't perfect and neither is Charles Xavier. We should honour elders but be very suspicious when we can't question them. They aren't always right.

They don't buy into Logan's hype and bullshit either. They're appalled at his behaviour that everyone has come to accept, so much that he's instrumental in their deciding to stay in the present and then defect. This maniac is full of shit. Their Wolverine is Laura - a much better person and hero, who they spend time growing up with. Obviously that didn't stick but I kinda wish it did. When they were returned to the past by Cable they were mindwiped, but their older selves got their memories. Two sets of experiences, minimum. In a metatextual sense they had to choose their canon, lol.

Bruh, he's right there. 'Why don't you kill Scott?'

I'm speaking very personally here, but I suspect many fans can at least recognise the shape of their experiences in mine. Everyone's headcanon is going to be a little different, though, of course. I was already a fan of the O5 but ANXM recontextualised them for me. The ultimate adaptation in many ways because the original run just isn't that relatable. Important yes, but the characters were drastically improved by redoing their teen years through a contemporary, deconstructionist lens. The characters were improved and deepened by having to stare their origins/selves in the face and then living in the same world for years. I find it impossible to separate the multiple choice past so I don't bother, if that makes sense. There's value and entertainment for me in revisiting the earliest stuff but I view it through a modern lens where possible. Honestly, there's so damn much of it that it can all blend together at times.

I have more thoughts than that, tbh, but that's the core of what everything builds off. They're legends that were not just allowed to be imperfect, but forced to be. Destined to be, even. Each of them has been on wild journeys together and apart but that history is still there informing everything. To answer your question in a more direct way - with all that in mind I find the dynamic compelling in retrospect. Aside from Scott and Jean they drift in and out of each other's lives, kinda like IRL relationships. That dynamic hasn't existed since it first started being adapted IMO, but it still informs their modern interactions and relationships. They're fluid like that.

Thanks for the ask!

[antianakin]

No. That's NOT what I'm saying here, AT ALL. Move away from biology and nature being the end all and be all.

First, Leia is Leia. She is not just "Character A with some of Character B sprinkled in." She is her own person with her own motivations and flaws. I am comparing her to Padme because I think the narrative intentionally builds that parallel for us and I find it interesting to look at the ways in which Luke and Leia are deliberately set up to be the successes to their parents' failures. That does not mean that Leia IS "Padme" in any way.

Secondly, Leia would never in any way be fortified by any of Anakin's anything. Anakin is a piece of shit and part of the reason he's a piece of shit IS his self-righteousness. And it's not like Padme didn't have plenty of her own self-righteousness, too. Leia is fortified by BAIL AND BREHA ORGANA, but it's not "self-righteousness" she's fortified by. She's fortified by their passion, their discipline, their wisdom, their kindness, their bravery, their willingness to stand up for what's right without burning down everything around them in the process. She's fortified by their absolute will to remain who they are in a world that wants them to capitulate everything out of fear. Leia learns how to be a good leader because she's raised by two of them.

Thirdly, Leia learns how to be a good leader because she actively CHOOSES to be a good leader when given the options. Leia does not succumb to despair and selfishness the way both of her biological parents do. Leia does not let love cause her to give up something that would allow the rebellion to win the war. She loves Luke, but she lets him go to the Death Star as a self-sacrifice because she knows it's necessary if they're going to win this war and respects the choice he is making in this moment. Padme starts off as someone who chooses to be a good leader, and remains someone who makes that choice SOMETIMES but not all of the time. Padme CANNOT give up Anakin for the sake of the war or anything else. She chooses to exonerate him when he murders children, she chooses to cover his murders up, she chooses to trade Grievous for him despite what that will mean for the war effort and the people who died to capture Grievous in the first place, and she chooses to lie to Obi-Wan to protect Anakin even after she discovers that Anakin committed a genocide and helped destroy the Republic. Padme would never have made the choice Leia makes in ROTJ.

If you think "self-righteousness" is what allowed Leia to let Luke go in that moment, then you might need to go watch it again. It's not self-righteousness that saves Leia from Padme's mistakes. It's compassion, something Anakin barely had any of in his adult life and something Padme struggled with by the end. And by compassion, I mean the way the term is actually utilized in Star Wars, a selfless love towards everyone. It's the opposite of attachment, it's an ability to let go of biases in order to show kindness to everybody, no matter who or what they are.

And then of course there's Luke. Again, it is not anything from Padme that saves him. He's never met Padme and, unlike Leia, he doesn't seem to have any kind of latent memory of her nor do the Larses seem to have ever told him any stories about her (not that they'd have had that many to tell, but we know they told Luke that his dad was a smuggler of some kind, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that they could've come up with a lie about who his mother was, we just never hear about it). If Luke is a better Jedi than Anakin, it's not somehow Padme's influence that saves him.

It's the Larses. This is Owen and Beru's down to earth hardworking values coming in. Unlike the Organas, Owen and Beru aren't really represented as these brilliant paragons of virtue. Owen and Beru make mistakes, even in terms of how they choose to parent Luke. But what this does for Luke is it shows him how to LEARN and GROW from his mistakes, something he uses quite a lot during the original trilogy. Luke learns how to be dependable and resilient. When it matters, Luke can rise up and do what needs to be done. He DOES have some of Anakin's darkness in him, that's a major element of his character and his narrative, but it's not his biological mother's compassion that saves him. It's Owen and Beru Lars's values, and it's the Jedi philosophies he was taught by Obi-Wan and Yoda. THAT'S what keeps him from making the same mistakes Anakin did.

Leia is Bail Organa's righteous passion and willingness to enter a fight tempered by Breha Organa's discipline and wisdom.

Luke is Owen Lars's protective instincts towards those he loves and firmness of opinion tempered by Beru Lars's empathy towards everyone she meets and open-minded acceptance of change.

As interesting as it can be to look at how Luke and Leia parallel their biological parents from a narrative standpoint, the two of them as people will always be so much more a product of the Organas and the Larses than Anakin and Padme.

People are SLEEPING on the most interesting Leia & Padme comparisons because there's so much focus on Leia being "like Anakin" because she gets annoyed sometimes and Padme being this perfect moral beacon of truth and justice despite all of her very canonical lies and cover-ups and obstructing of justice.

If Luke is the Jedi that Anakin should've been, then Leia is the LEADER that Padme should've been.

Padme is a hypocrite, proclaiming that all people deserve basic decency and the right to safety, but at the same time allowing Anakin to get away with a mass murder with no consequences by covering it up.

Leia doesn't even let Han get away with being a little bit of an asshole, there's no way she'd let him get away with mass murder. She holds everyone around her to a higher standard, believing in the best of them but also but refusing to accept excuses for cowardice and selfishness.

Padme talks so much about wanting the war to end, but then allows one of the opposition's biggest generals go free just to get Anakin back because she cares about him, causing the war to continue to go on for even longer.

Leia lets Luke sacrifice himself because she knows it's possibly the only way they might have a victory and beat the Empire, even though she knows what he is to her and loves him. She knows what has to be done and respects the choice Luke is making and would never condemn their efforts just to keep him with her.

Padme's story parallels Anakin's, she devolves as the narrative goes on, until she's barely a shell of the person she used to be. That strength and moral clarity she showed as a Queen is entirely gone, leaving only a scared woman pleading with a murderer to come back to her.

Leia's story parallels Luke's, she gains more and more strength and clarity as the narrative moves forward. The bossy young woman we first met has become a confident rebel leader who knows she doesn't have to harden her heart to be strong.

[beeari]

Talking about platonic Jalph!!

The human is, as many animals are, a social creature. Since the beginning of humanity we have worked in groups to ensure survival. Even to the most introverted people establishing connections with other people is primordial, and to a child that is in a stage when is developing a sense of identity on its own having it’s fundamental for the normative development of said child's psyche.

Both Ralph and Jack are at their age in a stage classified as early teenagehood. A stage where kids start to gain a sense of identity and start drifting from their families and prioritizing their relationships with their equals.

The first time they meet Ralph takes a very judgmental approach towards Jack, calling him ugly. This is interesting cause it’s common for individuals to attribute bad qualities to people we consider unattractive and not want to associate with them, however since the beginning Ralph seems interested in Jack, most likely because he sees how Jack has power over the choir and, in the context, he has similar power, it’s only natural that people with similar status to want to associate with one another and that’s how their relationship starts, as two kids that have power above the rest.

This dynamic however seems to change when they climb the mountain together they already start forming a friendship, as kids of the age are more likely to consider better friends those who they do most activities with, and it seems that what i’m guessing are the first few weeks it could be theorized the time they aren’t tending to their duties they spend a fair amount of it together. Using the example of the scene where before Jack hunts the first pig, when coming back to the tribe, goes to talk to Ralph, check how the shelter building is going. This scene follows the two having a conversation, and while it is normal for the two kids that have taken the role of leaders to discuss the problems they are having regarding issues that affect them all, Is curious how the very first thing Jack does is go talk to Ralph.

Ralph's admiration towards Jack is no secret if you’ve read the book, but is it reciprocated? Does Jack hold him to at least a similar standard? The most common reason why two kids get into a conflict is because of issues of power in a group, feeling like he has the right to more power was what mainly led Jack to drifting from Ralph's tribe.

But just desiring a higher status than Ralph is not motivation enough for wanting him dead, and you could argue that at this point Jack was probably reaching some level of disconnection from reality, and while that could be true, there’s something else that could be a determining factor on the pure hatred he develops towards Ralph.

“Favour piggy like you always do”

There are studies show that the feeling of being left out can lead to conduct of aggression, and feeling rejected by a close friend is something that for a twelve year old that doesn’t know about emotional regulation is devastating, “like you always do” implies that in Jacks eyes to Ralph Piggy is a bigger priority, that he is going to prefer Piggy, someone he deems as inferior, over him.

We don’t get enough time of these two alone to really determine how deep the platonic connection this they had, but for what we can see they at least seemed to garner an admiration towards each other, and it’s a shame they never get to actually talk their issues without one of them being almost hunted..

Golding has absolutely no idea about how a child's mind actually works, so this falls flat as he probably wrote the scenes of those two without considering the psychological implications. I’m no expert on the topic either and it's been a while since the last time I read the book but child social development is one topic that fascinates me and all my claims are backed with sources that I can provide if anyone wants me to.

I'm sorry if this is messy and probably doesn't make much sense but I we all agree someone needs to bring the topic to the table.

[wrestlingwreck]

LivDom's Problems

This is probably more of a vent post than anything else, but I said I would make a post about this at some point, so here it is. If you're a LivDom fan you're gonna wanna scroll past this.

Right off the bat I'm going to disclose that I am a RheaDom and L4B truther, but this post isn't about them. I'm going to do my best to view LivDom in a vacuum, without comparing them to other ships, except where it would be unavoidably relevant.

I also want to say that I have no issue with Liv or Dom as characters. I actually love both of them as SEPARATE ENTITIES. My problems begin and end with them as a couple. Also, this is in no way meant to hate on LivDom fans. I'm not going to tag this as LivDom because anyone scrolling through that tag probably doesn't want to see posts against them. This is purely an opinion.

Also, I know it's all kayfabe, but I'm treating it like it's real, because it's more fun that way.

With that said, I'm going to start with my most biased point, as it's based mainly on personal preference.

1. PDA

The amount of PDA shown by this couple is something I find to be uncomfortable, but more than that, it feels too showy, like they're overcompensating for the cameras. They're constantly hanging off each other, rubbing noses, making suggestive comments, and using pet names. It's Like they have to PROVE that they're a real, happy couple.

Additionally, Liv's insistence on calling Dom 'Daddy' is just... gross. I'm not against Mommy/Daddy kinks- some could even say I understand the appeal- but it crosses the line when someone calls their partner that in public in what is clearly supposed to be a sexual manner. I don't want to be forced to hear a woman call a man Daddy, and I don't know many people that do.

Also- and this is again more down to preference- you will never show me this man and convince me that he is 'Daddy.'

2. How They Started

Dominik and Liv literally got together because Dominik CHEATED ON RHEA WITH LIV IN FRONT OF HER AFTER SABOTAGING HER TITLE MATCH. Regardless of your feelings on RheaDom, that is deeply wrong. It also establishes a pattern of behavior.

We always knew that Dominik is a slimy little weasel- it's one of the funniest things about him. He betrayed his family for the Judgment Day, then betrayed Rhea for Liv. It isn't out of the question that he will eventually betray Liv for someone else.

Namely, another champion.

I'm not saying that this would ever actually happen, but it goes to further my point. When Tiffany essentially hit on Dom when talking about cashing in her briefcase, he didn't look uncomfortable or annoyed.

He looked... intrigued.

Until, that is, Liv looked back at him and he realized that his girlfriend might be upset.

It wasn't exactly the reaction of someone who is unquestionably loyal to Liv, is all I'm saying

3. His Reasoning

To start, I'm just going to quote Dominik verbatim as to why he chose Liv over her.

"Now, I got a girl that calls me Daddy. She gives me tendies whenever I want, she lets me play video games whenever I want, she lets me be me. And, she did something you could never do- finally helping me beat my deadbeat dad."

Does this sound like someone who chose Liv because he just loves her so, so much? Or does this sound like a spoiled child talking about why he wants his babysitter to be his real mom?

He only talks about what Liv does/did for him. He doesn't say that she's kind/smart/courageous. He focuses on her physical appeal and how she indulges him.

He also claims that he was embarrassed to call Rhea 'Mami,' but the first time he does it is of his own volition, and Rhea seemed visibly surprised when it happened.

4. Finally, Communication

Dominik isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer- this is nothing new- and he's not particularly skilled at reading the room. He doesn't pick up on tone or subtext. He doesn't read between the lines. He takes words at face value and doesn't question them. He requires clear communication, especially if someone is upset with him.

Liv is not someone adept at clear communication. She's passive-agressive and doesn't always say what she thinks. It's played for laughs, but it's still true.

After Rhea wins the title back from Liv, Dominik asks if Liv is mad at him for trying to hug Rhea (which he explained away as him trying to steal the title, even though he would know damn well that's not how it works), and Liv says that she isn't mad in a tone that makes it very, very clear that she is, indeed, mad.

Dominik, however, doesn't question this. He takes her words at face value, despite Finn, JD, and even Carlito being able to tell that Liv is at least a little upset with him. Eventually, we're led to believe that Liv just got over it, but the core issue of communication was not solved.

In Conclusion

Without taking other relationships like RheaDom and L4B into consideration, I propose the claim that Liv and Dominik are, in my opinion, the WORST kind of straight couple. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

[leethepiper]

Lower Iacon: Dock 12a

Cycle 6/20 

Solar Cycle 58 of the 72nd Stellar Cycle of the 48,196th vorn of the reign of the Lord 13th

[Roughly 7 AM, Friday, February 27, 2014]

The 5th company of the 3rd Battalion (or as they liked to call themselves: Ironhide’s Favorites) was helping load up the space transport for their next mission. They were heading to Dakar IV, a moon of the planet Jaqom, in the Marne system. During The Cybertronian Great War, Dakar IV had been an Autobot base meant to defend the energon harvesting operations on Jaqom. However, after the planet had been bombed to the pit, the moon base was left abandoned. Despite this, the place should be in good condition; the automatic defense and security systems were still active, and it would be useful in the war against the quintessons because of its strategic placement. 

The 5th company’s (and Ironhide’s) job would be to secure the base, then launch an offensive on the quintesson patrols in that area to draw them away from another planet in the Marne system: New Altihex. It was a neutral cybertronian settlement where the quintessons had attacked and enslaved hundreds. Hopefully, the 5th company would be enough of a distraction for Elita’s battalion to slip in and evacuate as many people as possible. 

Before any of that though, the transport they were using to get to Dakar IV had to be stocked and prepared for the ride.

Technically, the task could be left to the dock crew that worked there, but a little hard labor never hurt anybody, and it wasn’t like such a thing was unusual for Ironhide. Depending on the mission, he usually had either the company leaving or one (or both) of his other two companies help load up. 

Each company was a group of five squads of ten mechs each, all answering to a warrant officer, who answered to Ironhide. So, in each company, there were 51 mechs. So, that day, there should have been 51 mechs at the docks, not including the dock crew, or Ironhide himself.  

Of course, there weren’t 51 total because of a few mechs who couldn’t make it for various reasons. One was sick and had been for a while, but had asked Ironhide personally to allow her a chance to recover before she was honorably discharged; two were at pre-mission medical appointments because of health issues that shouldn’t be severe enough to be a problem, but should still get double checked; and two were skipping for a date that Ironhide was pretending not to know about since he was sick of them photovoltaic pussy-peding around each other.

Along with those five, there were two that had been late. 

Bluestreak was usually very punctual, but apparently Sunstreaker had gotten them lost on the way to the docks despite having been to them several times, having left early, and having a built-in navigation system. And Ironhide wasn’t just assuming that either. No, he knew that all of the human pilots all had nav systems, and although they weren’t as good as most cybertronian nav systems, they also weren’t nearly as bad as Sunstreaker made them seem either.

Ironhide was absolutely certain that Elita didn’t have to put up with this slag from Sideswipe.

Despite being late, Sunstreaker and Bluestreak had gotten to work right away, and had made good headway on the supply crates that needed to end up on the ship they’d be taking to the next deployment.

At some point while they were doing so, Sunstreaker had started humming. Ironhide had heard him humming before, but Sunstreaker had never struck him to be the musical type despite that. (Jazz on the other hand was more musical than even any musician that Ironhide had ever met.) 

Most Cybertronians weren’t very musical, and Ironhide was no exception to this, but even he could recognise that it was a catchy melody. 

Apparently Bluestreak had thought the same after having listened to it for a while, and asked Sunsteaker what song it was.

While normally when something like this happened, (and it had happened before, Sunstreaker tended to hum, and Bluestreak was a naturally curious mech,) Sunstreaker would answer with a song name and maybe a singer, but this time, Sunstreaker responded by singing out loud instead.

“And he don't know, Oh! 

That I dug my key into the side

Of his pretty little amped up four-wheel drive

Carved my designation into his animal-hide interior

I took a [Louisville] Slugger to both headlights

Slashed a hole in all four tires

Maybe next time, he'll think before he cheats.”

Maybe Ironhide was wrong about Sunstreaker being musically inclined, since he did have a nice voice. Despite that, not even his singing could change just how downright brutal the lyrics to the song were.

Digging a key into someone’s side, carving their designation into the interior of the victim’s altmode, taking a bat to both of their headlights, and slashing holes in someone’s tires were all horrific descriptions of what could at least be counted as assault, if not torture, and especially for the given reason. Cheating, while it was a bad thing to do to any datemate, inamorata, or even conjunx, wasn’t a reason to torture someone.

Among everyone at the docks who had heard the lyrics, most turned to look at Sunstreaker in abject horror, and those that didn’t, turned to Ironhide to make sure that he had heard. 

Bluestreak spoke first, and said what they were all thinking.

“What the frag Sunstreaker?” 

Sunstreaker hadn’t paused from what he was doing to sing, but he did now to turn to Bluestreak. He scanned the docks with his visor like he was trying to figure out what was going on. That’s probably what he was doing too, since pilots had a tendency to say concerning shit, then not realise why it was so messed up.

“What?”

Bluestreak took a vent before explaining.

“Sunny, you just sung a song about violently torturing and assaulting someone because they cheated on their partner.”

Sunstreaker didn’t move for a second, then he burst into laughter. 

“Oh, god, oh, sweet carrier [Mary], that [fucking] got me, holy [shit] Blue.” 

Sunstreaker, despite having calmed down, was still shaking slightly, and helplessly giggling too. 

“...I forgot that y’all do that transforming thing.” He chuckled, like he was explaining a real good joke. 

“WHat does that mean?” Poor Bluestreak still sounded downright alarmed about the whole situation, which just seemed to make it funnier for Sunstreaker, who burst into another fit of giggles. 

“The singer,” Sunstreaker had to pause to chuckle for a moment before continuing, “is referencing property damage, not assault.” 

Ironhide went through the lyrics again, and realized most were referencing things that humans didn’t have on themselves. They didn’t have wheels or tires, or interiors, and while they did have lights, they didn’t have headlights. So, it was likely that the song was referencing a non-sentient transport of some kind. 

Sunstreaker confirmed this a moment later.

“She’s referencing her ex’s not alive personal transport.” 

Bluestreak gave Sunstreaker a raised optical ridge in response. Sunstreaker was shaking from how hard he was laughing, and had long since set down the cargo he was carrying so as not to drop it.

Most of the others that were listening to the conversation chuckled along a bit, since it was rather ridiculous. 

Sunstreaker reset his vocalizer before responding to the look.

“Blue, I didn’t mean to skeeve you out…” 

Sunstreaker paused to pick back up his crate and then started walking into the transport again. Bluestreak followed with his own cargo. 

“…but, there are a lot of songs about murdering cheating exes,” Sunstreaker finished.

“Sunstreaker!”

Ironhide could hear Sunstreaker laughing all the way into the transport.

-----------------------------------

1300 words exactly (:

Hello! Welcome to the rambling section! I'm your host, LeeThePiper, and this is... 2006 Country Radio! (2006 was when before he cheats was released)

I'm kidding, but I will be rambling for a bit on this one, so skip if you want

First, "Solar Cycle 58 of the 72nd Stellar Cycle of the 48,196th vorn of the reign of the Lord 13th" Maths out to (roughly, really, really roughly) to the 58th day of the 4,000,340th year of Optimus' tenure as prime, which is based on the idea that their time system is based on the amount of time that the current religious leader has been in charge, and I got that idea from the fact that some nations used to do that with kings (it's been x years since __ became king) or bloodlines (the __ bloodline/dynasty has been ruling for x years)

Second, this is right before this -The monsters gone, he’s on the run, and your daddy’s here - one, so the moon base that they're on in that one is the one they're going to in this one (If you want to know literally anything about this section of the chapter, please ask me, because that was my most favorite part of this chapter despite it not being in the plans for this chapter literally at all)

Third, "photovoltaic pussy-peding" is just the Cybertronian way to say pussyfooting

Fourth, both Sunny and Sides are known for being unnaturally bad at directions (it's partially because they are bad at directions, and partially because their nav systems both got messed up in the crash onto cybertron/by the quint spacebridge)

Fifth, I personally headcanon that to Cybertronians, music isn't such a big deal as music is to humans, partially because they were in war for a long time (which destroyed a lot of instruments, killed a lot of musicians, occupied a lot of time, used a lot of control (kind of like how sedicious speech laws get tighter during war), and generally killed a lot of creativity and creatives, so less other forms of art too), and because I don't think that Cybertronians are as musical as humans regularly either

Sixth, the song is Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood, and the lyrics that I changed for the translator are "amped" instead of "souped"; "name" to "designation"; "leather" to "animal-hide"; "seats" to "interior"; and while I didn't change it, the brackets around Louisville mean that it didn't translate. Some of these are because I think that's how they'd translate, some are to make it make more sense narratively (which could also be counted as a translator error).

Seventh, "datemate, inamorata, or even conjunx" is translated to bf/gf, fiancé, and spouse

Eighth, “oh, sweet carrier [Mary]" is just "Oh, sweet Mother Mary" put through the translator.

Ninth, I did not mean to make Sunny so giggly, but I felt like it fit for this one, and I'm also still trying to figure out his characterization a bit, so

Tenth (and last but not least), @typewritingyip <3 for the Arcturus AU, and @keferon for the Mecha Pilot Jazz AU

Edit: I fixed the date (previously Jan 17)

[ukulelegodparent]

I really must say I hate these posts that make it sound like vegans are a major problem here or that leave out relevant details.

Like, I don't think the reason fucking everything is acrylic and polyester mix now is the fault of vegans rather than due to the fact that polyacryl sweaters are far cheaper to produce than wool ones and you can't get quality clothing anymore. This is a fashion industry problem. Not a veganism problem. There are just not that many vegans in the world. And sure the fashion labels who are using these cheap alternatives love to brand them as 'ethical' or whatever but like you do understand that that is a marketing tactic.

Honey is also a great topic. Now, this doesn't apply everywhere. But chances are that where you live honeybees are an invasive species that is taking resources from local native pollinators. Honeybees kind of always do this but it is less of a problem where they are native. Still: if you are considering getting bees to help pollinators, consider planting some local wild flowers and leaving some wood rotting in a corner of your garden (which I hope you have BC if you're trying to raise bees in an apartment I can't help you). It will do more for endangered pollinators than a bee hive ever will. I say this especially BC for example the EU allows companies to do green washing by getting bees which, you're at best doing literally nothing for the environment by keeping bees. Also as a side I know plenty of people who eat meat who consume agave syrup in about the same quantities as I do (next to none, but then I've also never been big on honey either). Like, it's fine to make a post about 'hey, your agave syrup is harming bats' but I don't see why vegans would need to be especially addressed. But then veganism is not a monolith and my diet is certainly not representative of that of eg a Californian vegan.

Also like. Honey is also mostly glucose and fructose. Yes, it has a lot of vitamins too, but acting like agave syrup is unhealthy because of all the sugar as opposed to honey is very silly. If anything a higher fructose content is preferable over glucose considering it does have a lower glycaemic index, assuming you're not allergic. But then I also think being vegan for health reasons is fairly stupid.

I'm also willing to hazard a guess that more agave goes into mezcal and tequila production each year than goes into the production of agave syrup each year. I mean I probably drink more Tequila in a year than I consume agave syrup and I am vegan.

And while yes, if you yourself or someone you know is keeping chicken that's great! I myself hope to some day be in a situation where I can have chicken BC they are my favourite animals. And if that is your situation: eat those eggs! I know how chicken are. If an egg cracks they'll eat it themselves. But then those aren't the only eggs you're eating. You're buying the baked goods from the bakery, you're buying cookies and ready-made cakes from the supermarket, you're eating things that have non-vegan breading, egg pasta, etc. And the chicken who layed those eggs most certainly did not live in someone's backyard with plenty of space to run around and do their little chicken things. Maybe the product at least has an ecological seal so the eggs must have had one too, but even with that there are farms that have some fairly horrid conditions. Basically if you do not personally know where the chicken came from you cannot know what their living conditions are like.

I genuinely do not understand the vendetta some people on this site seem to have against vegans.

Vegans of tumblr, listen up. Harvesting agave in the quantities required so you dont have to eat honey is killing mexican long-nosed bats. They feed off the nectar and pollinate the plants. They need the agave. You want to help the environment? Go back to honey. Your liver and thyroid will thank you, as well. Agave is 90% fructose, which can cause a host of issues. Bye.

[kxlluaz]

on my first rewatch of étoile and during episode 2 when Jack is telling Cheyenne she can't "come to new york and piss off the entire company in one fell swoop" (something around those lines, close to verbatim) I remembered how sometime after this moment is when Tobias over in Paris practically does the same thing, calling the entire French company to rehearsal just to not cast all of them and Geneviève says something nearly identical to him. I think its really cool how Tobias and Cheyenne are simultaneously opposites and parallels, kind of like a path forking in the road that leads to two very different outcomes (at least so far).

For different reasons and under different circumstances, they are both incredibly passionate about the work they do, in the sense that they are very particular about their personal art and will prioritize it over everything else. But the reason they turn out rather differently despite starting so similar is because Tobias gets someone in his life who is willing to support him how he needs in order to be freed from the pressures that are making it hard for him to do what he loves. Most people aren't willing to *learn* Tobias and work with him. When Gabin does, it also helps Tobias to start getting better at doing the same, to being more receptive to the collaborative aspect of art.

Side note, I know just how hard this is also as an autistic person who works in live entertainment tech. As much as I enjoy "working with others," it has taken me *years* to make progress in actually working WITH others and not just working around or near them. I can get so caught up in my personal vision of the way things "need to be" or "should be," and forget that the work I do and love inherently *needs* the ideas and experience of many, and is also all the more amazing for it.

But back to Cheyenne. Cheyenne has a similar mentality about the art she creates, like Tobias-- again, with many other factors involved, but what I'm trying to get at is they both come across the same way to most people in the show. She too feels more and more hopeless about the work she does. She explicitly states that she does not enjoy or love it, but it is her calling in this world, her obligation. What she was born to do. Tobias and Cheyenne both have a passion for what they do, and lose it more throughout the show. But where Tobias' love for his work is reinstilled through the support of another, Cheyenne's pressures are furthered and her turmoil worsens. She is not shown understanding or support, but rather her concerns are brushed off (i.e. the slip) and expectations are worsened. Cheyenne doesn't get a Gabin in her life who is willing to stick around, understand her, and help her change.

In the case of the job offer, she's ecstatic discovering something that she feels will rekindle her love for dance. She realizes how she can channel her passion in a way that *she* enjoys and is much healthier for her (physically and mentally). But ultimately, she's the one who gets shit from everyone else involved, despite doing nothing wrong. Geneviève only sees Cheyenne as her étoile, as her top dancer that makes the National money. Once Nicholas recovers, Jack rescinds the offer, understandably so, but he could've avoided getting Cheyenne caught in these crossfires in the first place had he waited to ask her until Nicholas had passed. He's also upset at Cheyenne, for making Geneviève upset at him, and ultimately Geneviève and Jack act like a divorced couple using their child as an outlet for their frustrations with one another. Don't even get me started on Gael just being... Gael. Love him in some ways, but he really could've handled things with Cheyenne better to say the least. Basically, Cheyenne is trying to make herself happy while also being obligated to make everyone else happy, and since it's impossible to please everyone, is turned against entirely instead AND loses the singular light at the end of the tunnel she found. Cheyenne's crash out was so incredibly valid, and it was so heartbreaking to see her get an entirely different outcome from Tobias at the end of season 1, having both started from the exact same spot and being taken in the exact opposite directions.

All this is to say, I really hope Cheyenne gets in season 2 what Tobias got for season 1: somebody to offer her a hand to pull herself up with, to help her take the first step so she can continue the journey.

I know I had a lot more evidence and points to make, like the choreographer for I Married Myself, but I've been pacing in my kitchen typing this for the past half hour and still have episode 2 paused in front of my dinner. I can GLADLY talk about this more and in more detail, since there really is so much to unpack with Tobias and Cheyenne's characters and how they're treated so differently due to their occupational roles (and, dare I say, genders and perceived neurotypes as well). But for now, to those of you who got this far, I hope you enjoyed this accidental mini-character-analysis-rant. Go watch étoile. Or watch it again like me if you already finished it.

[lichtluxx]

What is Veiling?

According to Dictionary.com, the definition of veiling is “An act of covering with or as if with a veil.”

When veiling, one is performing the act of covering the head and hair partially or fully. People veil for so many different reasons; to protect their energy, to help them feel grounded and safe, in respect of the entity and/or spirit they're working with. Anyone can veil, veiling is found in cultures and religions across the world.

When a person chooses to veil depends on their personal path. Some will veil during ceremonies, others during spells, and yet others will stay veiled any time they are out in public.

In this case, the act of veiling doesn’t necessarily mean covering the face. Unlike the burqa of Islam, a pagan veil is typically used to cover only hair, though on some paths it may be used for facial coverings as well. Also, both men and women may adhere to this type of worship.

This usually happens because the witch in question is either working with a deity or protecting one’s self from negativity or other harmful energies. Some pagans have claimed that it has reduced the number of headaches they get because they are using it as part of their shielding process.

There are many ways to veil. Most common is a headscarf or other piece of material wrapped around the head of the practitioner. Wide, fabric hair bands are also acceptable. Some will use a wig or a snood, both of which still provide a covering for the head.

Pagan men who veil also might wear head scarves, but other acceptable options are beanies or toques. Even a cowboy hat would do.

While veiling is as personal a choice as the spiritual journey of every person, it may become a more common sight as paganism grows worldwide.

Veiled Goddesses

Hera

Let’s start with the different goddesses who typically wear a veil or whose devotees may want to wear one.

Hera is often depicted wearing a veil as the goddess of marriage, women, family, and during childbirth. This goddess is more than just a wife, though. She has incredible powers, including weather manipulation, the ability to shape shift, control minds, and even drive people insane if she’s offended enough.

Demeter

Demeter is the divine mother and goddess of cultivation and crops. You’re probably familiar with her story as it relates to Persephone and Hades, but she’s one of the oldest goddesses of the Mediterranean world. She’s a great magician who offers protection, fertility, healing, and prosperity to her devotees who petition her. She’s sometimes portrayed wearing a veil, which is a beautiful way to honor her when working with her.

The Cailleach

The Cailleach is the Celtic goddess of winter. She’s a shapeshifter, though often shown as a crone. Her name actually means the Veiled One. She’s considered the maternal ancestor of all Irish men and is said to have formed Scotland’s mountains, so she’s a pretty big deal. While not evil, she has a complex personality and is wild and potentially destructive, like the winters in Ireland and Scotland can be. Her time is said to be from Samhain through Beltane.

Pagan Veiling

Veiling is an incredibly personal choice. Devotees of these and other deities may choose to veil as a spiritual practice to honor them. At the same time, you may choose to veil without working with deities. Some witches veil daily, and others do so only when sitting down to practice their magick or complete a ritual intentionally.

Magickal Veiling

Why would a witch want to veil? There’s something special about being able to wear a specific article of clothing or jewelry when working in a spiritual manner. It offers a tangible symbol of the distinction of how you’re using time. When you wear a veil at your altar, it’s magical time. When you’re not, then it’s not!

So, whether you do it in private or public, veiling can take many forms and is truly a beautiful practice to incorporate into your rituals and life.