#Between Ourselves

[slfcare]

be critical of yourself in a way that lifts you up, which means: catch yourself when you're thinking mean things about yourself / correct yourself when you're imagining what negative opinions others might have about you / encourage yourself to do better next time in a gentler and more optimistic way / never strive for more without acknowledging how far you have already come. it's okay to be nice to yourself.

[nonbinarylesbianherb]

ppl who are like "have you ever experienced a close female friendship" to try deny rhaenicent like.. yes bitch i have!!! and thats *exactly* why i can tell theres MORE than just "close friendship" between these two gay bitches!!

[kypopkypop]

Growing up the chubby girl and never being able to get a piggy back ride, you were always the one giving them to your friends. 😔

[rebouks]

Previous // Next

Jacob: Shit. Aster: What?! Tess: It’s a dead end!

Penny: What now?! Levi: We’ll have to go up. Jacob: Go, go!

[Robin took the lead and flew past the others, scrabbling up the ladder as fast as he could, praying they’d all make it up in time]

*snap*

Robin: Hoo-.. shit! Careful, guys!

[hplonesomeart]

HEYYY GUYS quickly hopping back on here, messily taping/supergluing my art onto the blog, and then promptly skedaddling right afterwards because OH BOY I need to focus this week and lock into my animation MAP part. The time crunch has gotten real!! AUUUUU!! But I had to get this image out of my system before anything else so here ya go enjoy some solitary confinement Puzzle appreciation. I’m sorry that it’s rushed!! Maybe once I finish this MAP I’ll return and make it less janky (specifically for the animated gif here because OOF that looks rough buddy. But it’s the best I can afford to do without getting totally side tracked on my goals. It looks real lazy and is low-key triggering me but I’m letting it slide—sir is mocking my perfectionism right now. Gotta focus all that energy onto the MAP instead).

Yea okay that’s all folks byeeee

Okayyyy so apparently not only is the animated gif janky in motion but also kinda broken?? It’s supposed to loop but that’s not working on Tumblr so guess the entire thing needs to be redone when I have spare time :P

I’ve decided to include a compressed version so you can at LEAST see what I was trying to achieve jksjsksp help this is a mess right now

[maid-of-the-golden-deer]

smth i love about zevran, amongst many others, is i dont think he ever really Lies to u- if he does, its usually a lies he also telling himself (being in the crows isn't so bad, that he isnt interested in love, etc). like if he doesnt want to tell u smth he just... tells u he doesn't wanna tell you

the moment hes not under the crows thumb hes just like "oh sweet i dont have to do this all this shit anymore"

[thatsmybook]

Some of my thoughts since the last episode of Agatha All Along:

The most earnest show of religion in an MCU property is being done through a queer kid. I like that the wider world is learning about the intersectionality of identity. I believe that Billy is as Jewish as William because a) the only family he knows has 'raised' him Jewish and b) his love of witchcraft and ritual and finding ways to explain his world intersect with the rituals and traditions of his faith. Even William was deeply fascinated with magic and witchcraft and journeys of discovery.

Marvel fans are aware that Wiccan is a strong character. The fact that this symbol of masculine strength can be found in a witch boy who is raised to be strong in his sense of self by women in his coven, is awesome. He is drawn to feminine strength as inspiring instead of looking for male heroes. He is attracting feminine forms of protection (Alice), feminine disruptors of the status quo and stereotypes (Lilia), strength in the feminine aesthetic and belief in your innate power (Jen), feminine quest for knowledge and ambition (Agatha). He is being shadowed by death (Rio), but even death gives life in its reincarnation (as we return to earth and feed the earth with our life-force to continue on in new forms).

I believe that Wiccan is/can be as important to the MCU as Spiderman is. Spiderman is a teenager who could be any and everyone. Spiderman looks up to Iron Man, especially but also seeks male role models and approval. (A big part of Iron Man's humanity and softness came from mentoring Peter Parker - I see parallels between Agatha Harkness and Iron Man in this way too).

I believe Wiccan is a version of masculinity to teens that can see that women hold the depth of knowledge and power that he is more interested in unlocking and that their experiences with adversity will be better guides for him as he grows to be the most powerful magic user in the MCU. He is also chosen as a witch and not a sorcerer/wizard/warlock.

Will we be getting little boys and girls and theys aspiring to be wiccans and spidermen equally?

[venice-1987]

An annoying phenomenon I've noticed

Alternatively: Whatever you do, don't go onto the TDP reddit

(Alternatively, let people ship things)

[janebonbon]

[msnihilist]

Once again, no, you were not groomed by proshipping. You were groomed by someone using proshipping.

My groomer used a pairing that I already liked to desensitize me to sexual interactions, and it was a completely normal and popular pairing. To this day, I still don't like it. It's completely okay to not like or even hate those things that your groomer used against you.

It's not okay to demonize an entire group of people or lump the ideology itself in with a terrible experience that you had. Your trauma does not make you infallible.

It is not the fault of the content you were shown that you got groomed. Groomers will use anything. They are bad people. The content you were shown is neutral.

[da-janela-lateral]

And You and I

[dayurno]

this is somewhat of a vent post & something i said i would not do again but has been plaguing me enough that i think getting it out might feel better. so. has anydoggy else been. Baffled and upset by nora sakavic’s refusal to speak on how terribly aftg has treated its characters of color? with the author of the series coming back with a new book and starting up on her online activity again, and questions of what she’d change about aftg bubbling up, it’s particularly glaring to me that we are all playing this very long game of pretend where we ignore how badly the non-white cast has been treated & her lack of thoughts on it

and i understand not wanting to bring up nicky and thea because people pick on her for it. i’m not trying to discredit nora sakavic’s terrible history of getting harrassed online by aftg fans. but i think it is very cynical, and it is very juvenile, and most of all very cruel, that she gets to ignore the very real ways the books have set up these characters to be hated. i think it’s obvious why the characters who get the most hate are the only canonical characters of color, and i think we do not get to treat this like a deliberate decision on the fandom’s part when the books have put these same characters in degrading and embarrassing and terrible positions in the first place. aftg is not a story about nice characters with clean pasts, but there is a very specific nastiness to the only characters of color being a brown man who sexually harasses and later assaults the main character, a black woman whose only scene is her lashing out at her love interest after being ignored for the first two books, and the japanese villain who gets maybe two lines of complexity before he goes back to being a terrible person. the white cast, in comparison, while not at all free from flaws, are never shown to commit mindless evil; all of their actions are ultimately justified. the book goes out of its way to give them concession after concession. we know exactly who to side with, because aftg tells us who these people are. does nicky’s assault ever get addressed in the books? does riko’s reasoning to be the way that he is ever gets more than briefly aluded to? is thea reserved even a shred of humanity or grace in her one scene?

anyway. it’s been years of talking about this and the fandom has been constantly hostile to criticism in this regard, and more recently any criticism at all, and it’s Grating to be on the other side of this discussion. it’s exhausting to know that in ten years we do not get even an acknowledgment besides the author saying she will not answer questions about nicky and thea anymore. it’s upsetting and it’s ugly and i wish no one had to talk about this again, but we do because what i thought was common sense has been washed away by a sudden influx of no-nuance adoration for the trilogy. basically i hope we all explode

[shesgonnachangetheworld]

honest question: is the "pity vote" even a real thing, or is it just something that feels true? do the sort of people who aren't Trump Fanboys but like Tough Guys* see this as a show of strength or a reminder of the man's own vulnerability?

[fjordfolk]

Melis has started policing and guarding around Luna (despite them being superfriends lately) which yknow. Annoying but workable, except

Luna is, of course, the most sensitive fragile soul to have ever lived, so 1 harsh, disproportionate "correction" from Melis and Lunert has decided her life is over and she will just. have to dissolve i guess

[gofancyninjaworld]

No one is born knowing how to communicate

A: And that's okay...

Dr Kuseno made it look so easy. He just swanned into Saitama's apartment, proferred him a gift of beef and the hero's hostility melted away.

Fubuki felt positively foolish, and yet encouraged.

Since then, however, she's found that the only thing meat bribes pull in are dogs. Literal dogs:

And even dogs need more than meat to be loyal.

What gives? Well, it's obvious that Fubuki mistook Dr Kuseno's gift for a bribe: more on that later. Probably. And yeah, it's funny, but it's more interesting than that.

Learning how to communicate is complex. There are a ludicrous number of unspoken conventions and rules in every human society, so much so that we don't fully learn how to smile socially until we're in our forties. Dr Kuseno carefully judged his gift: he had a legitimate reason to offer Saitama a gift in the first place, out of gratitude for Saitama going out of his way to mentor Genos. Then he chose a gift Saitama would be sure to appreciate and presented it at a time when Saitama would be thinking about dinner. The worst that could have happened is that Saitama took the gift but insisted on the doctor going home (and taking Genos with him) -- it would still have left the desired positive impression. And things went really well. Kuseno made it look effortless.

Fubuki is only in her early twenties and her experience to date has been far from typical. She's learned that either she can intimidate people or she can flatter them into doing what she wants. With Saitama (and later Bang, Bomb, and Kuseno), she has to learn how to talk to more powerful people whom she cannot overpower, over whom she has no leverage, and who are unimpressed by her looks, simpering, or flattery.

Fortunately, Fubuki is nothing if not astute. She's worked out that she needs to develop complementary skills if she's to make herself useful to the S-Class heroes she wants to hang with. How to talk to them to get the help and cooperation she desires? Ah, that's a work in progress.

B: ...Unless it's not

Let's move onto another miscommunication.

Something that I hadn't before was that, unlike the webcomic version where Saitama only thinks to himself that Genos seems depressed, in the manga, Saitama out and out asks him if this is the case. He wants to know.

It mirrors King asking Saitama that very same question and getting Saitama to open up and be vulnerable for the first time (ever, in any version of the story). So it is very appropriate to see Saitama trying to do the same for Genos, particularly as he is openly fond of the guy.

However, it goes wrong. Saitama feels himself under pressure to say something wise to make it better. So he puts on his best 'confident' face and inadvertently makes everything much worse. Oh dear. What makes this particularly painful in the manga is that Saitama is much more invested in trying to reach Genos, and it's made Genos think that Saitama saying that he doesn't see what he's doing must mean that earlier times when he's praised him must have been just Saitama being nice. For sure, Genos could have pushed back and made Saitama clarify what he meant, but he's even worse at communicating: and Saitama's glib remark about being bright struck him square in the insecurities.

I'm going to come to something that I only realised once I started typing this up. Even though I've pointed out their abilities to communicate, neither King nor Kuseno have the perfect words to say. Kuseno started out by first committing a faux pas in bringing his great big outside boots into Saitama's flat, then nearly boring Saitama to death with a long-winded explanation. King started out by trying to guess what was bothering Saitama. Both, however, did the most important thing about effective communication: they picked up on their going wrong and changed tack.

It's not about saying the right thing: it's about responding to the person you're talking to.

The thing that King did that Saitama was trying to do for Genos was to ask Saitama open questions, and shut up in the interim, letting Saitama talk to fill in the silence. He'd only speak to ask more open questions when Saitama ran out of things to say, and through that, gently started to challenge Saitama's thinking.

But doing so means being comfortable with several seconds of silence. And that is excruciating. It is almost irresistible to jump in and say something, anything. And it would have been a longish wait, for Genos to slowly sit down and decide to start speaking, which might well have started being about something only tangentially related to his worry. King did that for Saitama: Saitama started out talking about what was bothering him on the surface -- being too strong -- before eventually coming to what was really bothering him, feeling lonely and profoundly isolated from everyone around him. Saitama does not yet know how to wait a person out.

It's a problem in this case because it's introduced a big barrier between those two, not an insurmountable one for sure, but one that could easily compound later.

Ah well, no one is born a communicator. We just have to wait and see if they work out a way to open up and be honest with each other. So it goes! There's more ways to introduce conflicts than to have a monster trample Tokyo, after all!

And so help me, the struggle to learn how to communicate is 1000% worthwhile.

[sarah-drawings]

the hanged man