#Horribly dismissive

[ofekma]

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[shepscapades]

X isn’t big on hugs, but Doc does what he can. It’s the little things that help.

[evellynssocbrainrot]

Daily reminder that both Kaz and Inej have touch aversion. Not just Kaz.

[warrioreowynofrohan]

One of the oddest Silmarillion takes that I’ve seen recently is the idea that Beren and Lúthien had it easy.

I mean, let’s take a look at Beren’s life. The Battle of Sudden Flame hits when he’s in his early twenties. He spends five years carrying on a guerilla war against the invasion of his homeland by orcs and other evil creatures; his mother and all his female relatives have to flee, and he has no knowledge of whether they are desd or alive, or captured. There’s a strange darkness speading over the forest and turning it into something out of a horror movie, a place most people won’t even dare to go into. The band of guerillas is slowly whittled down to about a dozen people, who are hunted constantly by Sauron and his wolves. Then, while he is away, his father, his uncles, and everyone else remaining are brutally killed, and he returns to find crows eating their corpses and orcs joking about looting the dead.

He carries on an guerilla alone, against Sauron, for another several years, in the haunted woods od Taur-nu-Fuin. When he absolutely can’t last any longer, he crosses the most horrifying wasteland in all of Beleriand, where the only water present is poisoned and turns you mad, filled with evil spiders and who knows what other creatures. He’s in his early thirties but he’s been through so mich that he looks like an old man. He has lost literally everyone he has ever known; he does not know if any friend or relative of his, anywhere, is still free or living.

Then he meets Lúthien.

When he leaves Doriath on the quest of the Silmaril, which every sane person in Beleriand knows is laughably impossible, he goes to Finrod, the one person he can hope for any assustance from. Finrod has an entire realm; I don’t think Beren is any expectation that Finrod will go with him personally. And what happens? The king of the largest remaining kingdom in Beleriand besides Doriath is overthrown by his own people at the instigation of Celegorm and Curufin and left with only a few loyal people around him. All of whom then die torturously in the dungeons of Sauron, followed by Finrod’s own death saving Beren.

On top of everything else he’s been through, on top of spending several months in despair being tortured in Sauron’s dungeons, the survivor’s guilt that Beren must be feeling is extreme. Even after Lúthien rescues him, it takes him a while to recover. And he still hasn’t made any progress on the quest itself!

Then they’re attacked by Celegorm and Curufin – the people who bear a substantial amount of respinsibility for the death of Finrod and the Ten, the people who very deliberately abandoned them all to due and coerced all Nargothrond to do the same, and the people who kidnapped Lúthien and attempted to force her into marriage – and they try to kidnap Lúthien again, and to murder Beren.

The fact that Beren does not kill Curufin in that moment is a deed of extreme moral fortitude. The difference between Beren and Lúthien compared with many of the Finwëans isn’t that they don’t face temptations, or that their choices are easy, it’s that they overcome those temptations.

So. Beren spares Curufin’s life at Lúthien’s urging and Curufin immediately tries to murder Lúthien; Beren jumps in front of the arrow, is severely wounded again, and for the third time since they met Lúthien gets to work healing him. Virtually all of their time together has been spent with Beren recuperating from physical injury, psychological injury, or both.

And as soon as Beren recovers, he walks away from the one person who loves him who’s still alive, and prepares to rob the gates of Hell, alone. Because Beleriand is dangerous, and as long as Lúthien is with him and therefore unable to go anywhere safe, she will be in danger from both the servants of Morgoth and the sons of Fëanor. And even if there’s a virtual 100% chance that him walking into Angband will lead to him being slowly tortured to death, that’s a better option than the one person he has left getting killed or, worse, captured, because of him.

And then she goes with him anyway. And beyond all hope they actually succeed in getting a Silmaril - and then he immediately loses it, and his hand, to Carcharoth, and it was all for nothing.

And for the fourth time since Lúthien met him, he’s near death and she’s desperately fighting to heal him and kerp him alive, while she’s exhausted to the point of collapse. And this is the moment when she gives up and goes back to Doriath, because that is what has the best chance of keeping Beren alive.

And then, at last, a ray of hope – Thingol looks at all they’ve been through and says, fine, you crazy kids can get married. And they’ve scarcely been married yet when they learn that oh, it’s not over, Carcharoth is rampaging through the land killing people and this needs to be dealt with. And Beren, even after everything, insists on going. (Because, hello, survivor’s guilt! he probably feels that this is his fault for, uh, getting his hand bitten off.)

(The fact that the Silmaril was, for a time, inside a wolf and outside Doriath, and Celegorm, noted hunter, never got near it, is, okay, rather amusing to me.)

And then Beren dies, saving Thingol, because he knows deeply what it feels like to lose his family and he’s not going to let that happen to Lúthien. And she loses him instead.

Now let’s shift to Lúthien’s point of view. Since her first meeting with Beren she has been betrayed by literally everyone she knows and everyone she meets except for Beren and Huan. She has been treated like a child, and a madwoman, and a trophy, and a pawn, and a sex object, and literally everything except an adult person whose choices have worth and meaning. She is not a superhero; she does not know what she is doing; she is terrified for practically every moment of it, for Beren’s sake even more than for her own, and for much of it she is hopeless. She does not know how or if she can achieve anything; she only knows that she has to try, because it is better than sitting in Doriath waiting to find out if Beren is dead. She puts substantial work and thought and effort into figuring out how to get out of Doriath (given in more detail in the poetic version) – and then, just when she thinks she’s found help (note: Celegorm and Curufin do not give her their names when they first meet her; she doesn’t know they’re the sons of Fëanor), she is again taken captive, this time with the goal of forced marriage and the threat of rape hanging over her. And she still knows Beren is in desperate danger, and she still can do nothing about it.

When Huan aids her and she goes to Tol-in-Gaurhoth, it isn’t because she feels she has the power to fight Sauron one-on-one! It’s because she’s desperate and can’t think of any other options. And in fact, it is not she who defeats Sauron, it is Huan; once he is defeated by Huan, she has the intelligence and strength of will to force his surrender by threatening him with something he fears more than defeat, and to demand – not the freeing of Beren alone – but the destruction of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, freeing all its prisoners. The reason she defeats Sauron is not that she’s a half-Maia badass who can wave her hands and do everything easily! The reason she defeats him is that she shows up there completely vulnerable and in effect uses herself as bait. That is an extraordinary degree of courage, not some kind of deus ex machina. And she’s putting all the strength that she has on the line – she’s pretty much passing out by the time she finds Beren. Similarly, all her healing of him is hard, exhausting work that she’s doing despite being, the whole time, terrified that he’s about to die. None of this is easy.

Likewise in Angband – Huan’s advice and Lúthien’s magic of disguise and sleep is invaluble in getting them through the door and past Carcharoth, but the reason she is able to enchant Morgoth and cast all Angband into sleep is not primarily because of extreme power, but because, like every other non-Beren person she meets, he doesn’t take her seriously. Morgoth finds the idea of using Melian’s daughter as a brief entertainment amusing (and, if you read the poetic version, makes some truly creepy sexual threats against her), and that’s how she is able to get him unguarded enough that she’s well into her song and he’s already getting sleepy before it starts to occur to him that maybe this isn’t going quite as he planned. Lúthien’s victories are not because she’s just on a different power level from the rest of Beleriand, they’re because she’s amazingly brave and willing to walk into the most dangerous places virtually defenceless. And she and Beren rely on each other utterly – after her sleep song she’s practically passing out and can only get out of Angband because Beren is holding her up.

So this is who they are, at Beren’s death. A man who has lost everyone he loves and everyone who loves him, every friend or family, often helplessly witnessing their gruesome death – everyone except for Lúthien. And an elf-woman who has been betrayed by everyone she loved or trusted, except for Beren.

When Beren dies, I wonder if he’s even relieved that it’s finally him dying instead of everyone around him. When he sees Lúthien in the Halls of Mandos, I believe his first feeling would be not joy or love, but horror. That the last living person he loved, and the one he wanted above all to save, had now died because of him.

But Lúthien isn’t done. She goes to Mandos, and she sings, and her song says: look at what we have been through, look at what all Beleriand has been through, Eldar and Edain. We don’t want realms or glory or power; we only want a few moments of peace with each other, and we fought so hard for it, and we didn’t even get that. And when she’s offered bliss and immortality for herself, she says No, I don’t want it, not without Beren. She isn’t promised happiness or long life – she only know that for the short time she will get, she will have the chance to be with Beren. And that is enough for her; for that, she gives up everything else.

This is a faerie-story; but it does not sound to me like a trite tale of easy victories handed to the heroes by Fate or by the author! They fought and struggled and sacrificed for those victories, amd they did it without ever letting go of courage, and mercy, and humility. There is a reason why this is the story that Frodo and Sam hearken back to for inspiration.

[fayevalcntine]

The whole framing of Lestat as the sole symbol of patriarchy that fandom is so desperate to put him in doesn't work unless you deliberately ignore how he was also a victim of rape and abuse before he was turned. People want him to be fit into this strict role of "father figure/violent husband/perpetrator" that is only that and not even a whole person, and in doing so they need to push aside the fact that despite being his family's provider, he was also pushed into that role when his father forbid him from joining a monastery or gaining an education that he wanted. Lestat wanted to run away with a theater group as a kid, and actually managed to do so once Gabrielle gave him her blessing and monetary support in order to go to Paris. He didn't always want to be the provider, he was forced into that role and became despondent when he thought he would never get a chance to leave his home.

His new life prior to being turned is pretty much the antithesis to the whole "Lestat is a manly man who would sooner throw up than be compared to a woman" spiel: he lived with another man in Paris while also being an actor, having left his family and "responsibility" to them. The only family member he was ever close to was his mother, all the other male members shunned or ridiculed him. Add onto that the fact that his turning firmly placed him within the role of the damsel/victim: he's kidnapped from his bed by a stranger, taken into a tower and left to rot while being fed on for a week, before then being raped and violently turned all while never even being asked if he would consent to it in any normal circumstance. But you of course have to ignore all of this if you want him to only represent the aggressor/patriarch while Louis is the helpless unhappy matriarch of the family.

My issue isn't that I think Louis isn't a victim, it's that it's not unrealistic for Lestat to be an aggressor/abuser while also displaying traits that aren't regularly assigned to stereotypical depictions of male characters. He's abusive to Claudia while also having been a victim of abuse from his own family. He's not a good maker/teacher, but he also didn't even have one when he was turned. He's the provider/attempted protector of the family and seemed to like being that, while also having run away from his own family prior to this to act in a theater in Paris. He's a rich white man while also being obviously effeminate in public spaces, even to Tom's own bigoted humor.

Like Louis' own complicated story with being his family's benefactor and provider, you can't firmly place Lestat as being one thing or another in terms of gender ideals without deliberately ignoring parts about him that don't fit this. And I don't think it's an absolute necessity, when even in Louis' own story, Lestat isn't stripped of his effeminate mannerisms or behavior while also being the abusive maker/father/lover.

[yujeong]

oh. by tonkla’s "it'll get better" (tapping win’s cheek) what do u think he meant by it. is he completely out of korn’s life now? watchuguysthink?

Anon, I'm afraid Tonkla cannot get out of Korn's life without facing some serious consequences, the most severe one being.... becoming homeless.

(In case it wasn't obvious to some fans, Sammon confirmed that the house Tonkla is living in is Korn's, although I personally had figured it out on my own.)

But other than that, I don't think Tonkla wants to get out of Korn's life. He still loves him and wants his attention and affection. He just got justifiably upset by Korn's behavior and kicked him out.

Now, in my opinion, what he meant when he said "It'll get better" to Win was their own relationship - Tonkla and Win's. Meaning that Win will get used to Tonkla's situation and there won't be any problems in the future for them. Let's not forget that he said it as a response to Win's "What should I do now?":

"Should I leave? Should I stay?"

Tonkla essentially told him to not think too much about it. I don't trust Win to do that, though.

I love it so much when the dialogue is subtle and BOC has produced so many shows with scripts that contain a bunch of it. I couldn't be happier about that, to be honest.

[palmtreepalmtree]

I keep having the same conversation with different people, which is some version of 'if only the democrats had done XYZ that appeals to my specific demographic echo-chamber.' I'm sure there are valid points to be made, but as one of those generation straddling xennials or whatever, I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that we don't always hear what other people in other groups are saying. Maybe it's a thing that you think would dramatically motivate your cohort, but it is also deeply alienating to a different part of the voter base. And if your cohort is not of a demographic that usually turns out in large numbers to vote, it's hard to expect any campaign to prioritize your priorities. It's a bit of a catch-22.

I mean *deep, soul-wearying sigh* a lot of this is just a two-party problem, isn't it? I'm fucking tired.

[deservedgrace]

"Idk what kind of Christians YOU were around but I've never seen ANYTHING like that in the 50 years I've been a Christian" Wow! Great! Good for you! I don't give a fuck! I'm still severely traumatized!

[hwangyeddeongie]

I swear to god if I see one more kpop stan complaining about gayo daejaejeon MAYBE getting cancelled because of the plane crash I’m going to have a breakdown. I promise you’ll be fine if that collab stage you wanted doesn’t happen. 179 people just DIED, please have some humanity.

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

having other people affirm that we were right and that our abusive ex roommate was, in fact, the problem and is, in fact, horrifically abusive to everyone she lives with on one hand really fucking sucks for the people who are living with her and experiencing it to be able to learn that, but im gonna be honest its also so fucking good to hear multiple people be like no ur not crazy she really is that bad

[ciderjacks]

The JD vs Amber Heard stuff was actually insane. I didn't keep up with it because I disagreed with the sheer principle of publicizing something like *that* but the misogyny was MASK OFF...

NO LIKE FRL IT WAS SO INSANE

[faegacha]

Blah blah blah noble vampire drama, we love noble vampire drama.

Vampire nobility doesn't care who you have relationships with but you're obviously not supposed to take in your illegitimate children

Characters: Rose & Thallious Gold-Blood

[marenwithanm]

I don't wanna come off as a jerk here, but I really dislike Quaver. Not her design, but her personality. I really hate it when people use Undertale Yellow's version of Integrity as their headcannon for the Integrity soul. Yes, Integrity did kill some monsters, but she only killed them in self-defense. Also, the monsters attacked Integrity first and she had every right to defend herself since they were after her soul. Like I said before, I don't hate Quaver, I just really hate how most people see the Integrity soul as a heartless and evil girl when that isn't the case at all.

Hey fair enough. And to be clear, Quaver's not evil. She killed a lot of monsters but they were trying to kill her so ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯ I mean, she already had a standing hatred of monsters before she fell, but who knows, maybe if they didn't attack her first, she could've learned to overcome that and get along with them. Having the integrity soul be the most violent isn't what I would've initially chosen either, but like I said before, my human souls are all essentially a reaction to Clover, so I gotta work with what's there in undertale yellow canon. Still, I don't think that undertale yellow was trying to imply integrity as being evil either. The monsters definitely see her that way, with how they talk about the "snowdin incident", but it's a nuanced issue. To the monsters, humans are evil and they keep proving that by killing more monsters as they fall down. To the human souls, the monsters are evil as they keep attacking them just for existing. Our information about integrity in the world of undertale yellow is told to us entirely from the monsters point of view, therefore it's presented in a way that shows her in the worst possible light. That doesn't necessarily mean that the monsters are right about her.

So yeah I don't think integrity is meant to be evil in the world of undertale yellow, and she's definitely not evil in my interpretation of her as Quaver. She's a scared, angry kid who just had all her preconceived notions about monsters proven true when they attacked her after falling down. Of course she goes on the offensive. Whether or not she's right to do that is a matter of nuance and debate, but I digress

[semiotomatics]

lol. i think ive reached my limit.

[reel-fear]

MIKE BLOCKED ME ON TWITTER FOR ROASTING HIS DUMBASS RESPONSE TO THE GRAPHIC NOVEL STUFF!!

grown ass man scared of the 19-year-old queer being mean to him over his public meltdown more at 8.

[zymstarz]

yeah sure that's how i'll [re]come out