#I could say a lot more

[thefableddestiel]

Here’s a parallel I noticed that highlights the difference between Cas relationship with Dean and Cas relationship with Sam pretty well. Episodes 10x22 vs 14x15

When MOC Dean is beating up Cas, Cas doesn’t hit back even once. The most he does is try to bear hug him from behind to calm him down. But not a single punch.

When Sam is Justin Smith, Cas says he won’t hurt him, but he actually does pick him up and slam him into the ground. It’s not a big deal, obviously he knows Sam can take it, but it’s something he wouldn’t even do with Dean.

Before the actual fighting, Cas tells dean, “I’m your friend… I’ll be the one that watches you murder the world.” And then when MOC Dean is on top of Cas holding the angel blade to him, Cas holds onto the wrist Dean has on his tie and the only thing he says is, “please”. He doesn’t even try to grab the hand holding the knife. And then Dean stops.

On the other hand, when Sam is on top of Cas trying to stab him, Cas uses an entirely different approach. He’s forcibly holding back Sam’s arm that’s holding the angel blade. He tells him he understands that he wants to be happy, but that if he does this he fails the people they lost. He says “if you do this you fail Jack. Sam, you fail Dean.” And that makes Sam stop.

The difference that’s so stark is that Cas has to appeal to Sam through talking about Dean. But Cas can appeal to Dean through his own relationship to him. He doesn’t need to bring up what it will do to Sam or anyone else, because their own relationship is powerful enough and he knows it.

[hookliner]

i wanna kiss him. i wanna pin his wrists above his head. i wanna hold his hand in public. i wanna learn his order at local stores. i wanna eat him out. i wanna learn what his body feels like in the dark. i wanna make him laugh. i wanna play a video game with him until the early hours of the morning. i wanna get high with him. i wanna make him cum. i wanna paint his nails. i wanna love him and have it be known.

[vitos-ordination-song]

Rufus Weylin was an interesting, compelling, pitiable, and loathable character. It would have been easy for Butler to just write off his behavior as a product of his time, but the fact is, he may have been a bad person no matter what time he was born into, despite having some likable qualities.

Examining the character, I don’t think racism was one of his major motivators. His dependence on Dana from childhood made him more aware that he wasn’t inherently superior. He was also introduced to radical ideas that he was forced to accept as true—slavery would one day end, interracial marriage would become legal, and black women would be considered equal to white men. He was treated like an object himself as a child, hit with the same whip used on slaves. Despite all of that, he didn’t become an abolitionist, an anti-racist, or even a particularly decent man. He could have; it wasn’t impossible for people of that time to do so. So why not?

Rufus was written as a self-centered person with a strong temper, capable of loving but only possessively. He could have been an abuser even if he’d been born in the 20th century, but with the power of a slave holder, he was bound to become a monster. Dana’s influence undoubtedly restrained him, but not enough. When he became the master of his father’s estate, he didn’t act as horribly as his father had, but he prioritized his own desires first. He wanted Alice; he was a rapist. He tried to control Dana, and his crimes against others were motivated by his possessiveness.

It says something about his character that he was going to kill himself on losing Alice, and in a way, he did commit suicide ultimately, by attempting to force himself on Dana. I think he knew that was a line he shouldn’t cross. Rufus’s character highlights the sickness of the enslaver: a person who is so intent on possessing another that they destroy themselves.

On the one hand, you could say that Dana and Rufus’s story transcends the historical setting and becomes universal, a story about human relationships marred by possession. But I do think their relationship has something to say about black/white politics, historical and present. I was particularly struck by Rufus revealing near the end of the novel that since childhood, he’d been plagued by nightmares of Dana leaving him to die. Here was one black person with the power to hurt and betray him. His subconscious gave him those dreams as an expression of his racial guilt and anxiety. Many white people fear revenge for the history of racism. He knew on some level that his people deserved comeuppance, and so did he once he started abusing his power. Yet Dana was actually kind to Rufus, forgiving and understanding, until the very end. Those with less power must have empathy for those with more—it’s a matter of survival. And Dana didn’t want to hurt someone without cause. She was even tempted to comply with his advances in that final passage. But she decided, no. I will not allow this. I am a human being who has the right to reject this man. The novel was full of scenes of Dana holding back, not defending herself, swallowing anger. But when she had the chance and the reason, she sprung into action. Through this, Butler demonstrates that submission for survival is not the same thing as capitulation; it is merely biding one’s time. Even then, Dana had to pay a cost. It wasn’t punishment, she was not guilty. It was just an acknowledgement of the harm done to her—through slavery, and through being forced to kill Rufus, her own ancestor, oppressor, and friend.

[profbastard]

I know this is a stupid question, but are you going to watch the Super Mario Bros. Movie?

I know I will at some point. I think I'd like to watch it in a language other than English though. Maybe Spanish if the dub is good (I'm functionally fluent in Spanish, but far from a master/native speaker)

I have a lot of BIG and COMPLICATED feelings regarding the movie, so it'll be like ripping off a bandage for roughly uuhhh an hour and a half.

[wasyago]

tango doodles

first you make up a guy and then you struggle to draw him correctly

[hinamie]

unconditionally

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Soup solves everything.

[cozylittleartblog]

Columbo and the Knight (1984)

put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they're my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages...), so writing credit goes to them.

Autism W!

[inkskinned]

i love when words fit right. seize was always supposed to be that word, and so was jester. tuesday isn't quite right but thursday should be thursday, that's a good word for it. daisy has the perfect shape to it, almost like you're laughing when you say it; and tulip is correct most of the time. while keynote is fun to say, it's super wrong - i think they have to change the label for that one. but fox is spot-on.

most words are just, like, good enough, even if what they are describing is lovely. the night sky is a fine term for it but it isn't perfect the way november is the correct term for that month.

it's not just in english because in spanish the phrase eso si que es is correct, it should be that. sometimes other languages are also better than the english words, like how blue is sloped too far downwards but azul is perfect and hangs in the air like glitter. while butterfly is sweet, i think probably papillion is more correct, although for some butterflies féileacán is much better. year is fine but bliain is better. sometimes multiple languages got it right though, like how jueves and Πέμπτη are also the right names for thursday. maybe we as a species are just really good at naming thursdays.

and if we were really bored and had a moment and a picnic to split we could all sit down for a moment and sort out all the words that exist and find all the perfect words in every language. i would show you that while i like the word tree (it makes you smile to say it), i think arbor is correct. you could teach me from your language what words fit the right way, and that would be very exciting (exciting is not correct, it's just fine).

i think probably this is what was happening at the tower of babel, before the languages all got shifted across the world and smudged by the hand of god. by the way, hand isn't quite right, but i do like that the word god is only 3 letters, and that it is shaped like it is reflecting into itself, and that it kind of makes your mouth move into an echoing chapel when you cluck it. but the word god could also fit really well with a coathanger, and i can't explain that. i think donut has (weirdly) the same shape as a toothbrush, but we really got bagel right and i am really grateful for that.

grateful is close, but not like thunder. hopefully one day i am going to figure out how to shape the way i love my friends into a little ceramic (ceramic is very good, almost perfect) pot and when they hold it they can feel the weight of my care for them. they can put a plant in there. maybe a daisy.

[stump-not-found]

young man has wonderful encounters yay

[nonbinary-vents]

I remember that when everything was happening with Noah Schnapp, so many people were saying that ‘he’s a white coloniser!’ ‘he’s clearly European!’ and ‘how are we supposed to think he’s indigenous to the Middle East when he looks like that?!’ They were screaming so much about he couldn’t possibly be from the swana region due to being pale, despite the fact that… wait for it…

Noah Schnapp is a Moroccan Jew.

The exact the same thing happened with Jerry Seinfeld too, despite him being a Syrian Jew.

But what this tells me is that so many American and European leftists fundamentally do not understand what North Africans and Southwest Asians look like. They do not understand that many Middle Eastern groups are pale, many Middle Eastern groups share features with Europeans— I mean, the Middle East literally borders Europe, did you not expect us to have similarities? This stretches back to the ancient world too. We know that in Yehuda there were gingers, as shown by King David*. Iirc, studies on Rameses the second’s remains show that he most likely had an olive tanned complexion and reddish-blondish hair, similar to a European Mediterranean look— which makes total sense seeing as Egypt is literally a Mediterranean country as well

It’s not just Jews. Persians, Kurds, Assyrians, Copts, Amazigh, Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula**, all of these ethnic groups are incredibly diverse in their features, even without any significant genetic influence from other areas. You cannot just project American and European black and white concepts of race onto the Middle East and act as if that is reality. The world is not split into pale people in the north, brown people in the middle, and black people in the south, and if you genuinely believe that then you really need to look at some pictures of the groups that you’re claiming to be the defender of. Please. I’m so tired of this bullshit lol

*I know that the historical evidence for David is shaky at best and we’re not sure if he was real or not (I personally believe it’s a King Arthur sort of situation where there was a real person here that got turned into legend), what I’m trying to say is that if the Ivrim could have a figure like this who was ginger, then the Ivrim clearly had gingers. Nobody come for me please

**not adding other Arabs because there tends to be genetic mixes with other groups, and my point is about how even without distinct genetic markers from each other, middle easterners groups can turn out with a super intense variation in appearance, especially skin tone

[keferon]

Did you think I was done? Ahahahaha no, I have more.

Because chapter 70 of MOMU gave me the very dynamic between them that I missed so much, I just blacked out and started drawing uncontrollably lmao

Also. ALSO. I noticed a while ago that Prowl has the habit of..like…constantly frowning. So. I did a bit of research and made this graph.

In 70 chapters, Prowl frowns rougly 104 times. And the intensity of this gesture is very clearly correlated with the development of his relationship with Jazz, as you can see ahahahahah It might be wrong tho don’t take me seriously I’m not good with graphs

[bookalicent]

yeah so this was insane

[jingerpi]

meaningful work: transgender experience in the sex trade

[puppppppppy]

horrible truth bomb dropped on my head 20 min ago

[mewmewdoppio]

A sma𝗹l billf𝗼rd c𝗼mic that too𝗸 me a few days to make with my take on a human bill design.

𝗖ouple more sketches + f𝗹at/alt c𝗼lor𝘀 of pag𝗲 four.