#I don't know if I love this one

[oreoambitions]

Kara hangs some four feet off the floor, palms sweating, legs trembling, and tries not to close her eyes. Four feet might as well be forty. Might as well be four hundred. The move is a drop knee and a reach up with the left hand and she can do it, has done it before, has to do it again because otherwise fear wins this one and since when does Kara Danvers let fear win? She turns the knee in but the left hand has a mind of its own and it wont let go. If she lets go she’s going to fall. And if she falls…

She pushes off the wall and drops the four feet with ease, lets her knees fold, indulges in an unnecessary backwards flop onto the mat. She stays there for a long moment, eyes on thick wooden rafters high above, chest heaving with what feels even to her to be unnecessary drama. The absurdity of it all would make her laugh if the frustration of it all weren’t burning hot through her veins. It’s a V0. It’s a climb for beginners. For Kara, it should have been nothing.

But today it’s something. Alex would say, we are taking each day for what it is. We are meeting each day as we are. We are refusing to swell in the past. Easy for Alex to say.

Kara rolls to her feet to take up a perch on the cubbies just off the mat. A couple of minutes and some water and she can try again. It’s about the strength of her will, isn’t it? The body is strong. Not as strong as it once was, but strong enough. It’s the mind that falters. A boy no older than 14 scrambles up a route of tiny chips, his weight all on his fingertips and toes, defying gravity 16 feet straight up with no hesitation, and Kara looks away. There is nothing, and everything, to fear. And isn’t that what she’s come here for? To look fear in the eye and win? Because if she wins…

“Injury?”

Kara startles so hard she almost knocks her own water bottle out of her hand. The woman who settles down onto the cubbies next to her suppresses a smirk. Kara tries without success to suppress her own heartbeat. Green eyes meet hers for half a second and flicker away. Suddenly Kara finds herself fascinated by the loose thread on the seam of her climbing pants.

“Sorry,” the newcomer says. “I know it’s hell of an assumption. I just thought- I’ve seen you around a couple of times.”

Kara has seen her around too, because, and she means this in the gayest possible way, shoulders. The woman beside her is, according to all available evidence these past few weeks, allergic to shirts. Addicted to sports bras. And she’s clearly never skipped a training day in her life, because shoulders. Has Kara mentioned the shoulders? And let’s not talk about the abs. Kara cannot, in fact, look away from the abs. She makes a noble effort to redirect her attention to the lose thread.

“I just joined a couple weeks ago,” she chokes out.

“Lena.”

Kara is so busy looking the other way she hesitates far too long before taking the hand offered to her. Who shakes hands these days anyway? But she takes it, and then she hesitates another moment too long before letting go, because warm.

“Kara,” she replies.

“You don’t move like a new climber, Kara,” Lena comments. “But I never see you on anything steeper than a V1, so I’ve been wondering. And it’s super rude of me,” she concedes, nudging Kara with another smirk, “ but I thought I’d just ask because, as it happens, I am also working some lower grade problems right now because I tore my ACL a little while back.”

“You tore your-”

Lena waves her off. “Happens. So I was wondering if-”

“Happens?” God. Humans are fragile. And reckless. And well muscled. And warm. God. Focus.

“So I was wondering if you wanted to be my injury recovery accountability buddy. You know? We can hype each other up, remind one another that there’s no shame in easier climbs. Maybe we can meet up and do a couple workouts off the wall, some prehab, some core. That sort of thing.”

What Kara should say is, “Sure, but if we’re doing that, I’m definitely gonna need your number.” Maybe not. Maybe something similar to that but smoother and paired with some kind of winning smile. Kara has never before this moment worried about whether her smile is winning or not. What she says instead is, “I’m actually not injured. It’s- I can’t get out of my head.”

Lena nods slowly, her gaze joining Kara’s on the loose thread now twisted tight between Kara’s fingers.

“So…” she says after a long pause, “Was it a fall?”

For an instant, Kara is there again. And it is four hundred feet rather than four, and the concrete rushing up so fast below her, and the taste of ash in her mouth, the smell of iron and blood choking and choking her as the wind whips past, and then the crack-

“Yeah,” she says. Her fingers flex. “And now I can’t- And now I’m scared of heights. And I’m-” Human, she almost says. “And I’ve lost a lot of strength.”

Lena reaches out to tug the loose thread from between her fingers. “Just because it’s in your head,” she says, “Doesn’t mean it isn’t an injury.”

That’s the kind of thing Alex would say. That’s the kind of thing that would make Kara want to roll her eyes on a good day - would, on a bad day, make her want to scream and rage against the unfairness of a solar flare that might just never end, against the tedium of building strength and endurance one slow painful day at a time, against the weeks piling one on the other, the waiting, the fear, the courage that never comes back to her no matter how hard she tries.

Coming from Lena, it isn’t so bad. Lena’s hand lingers on Kara’s a moment too long, and Kara decides the line. “Guess I’ll need your number if we’re gonna be accountability buddies.” She tries the winning smile too, risks a glance back up into those too green eyes, just for good measure.

Lena laughs. Her hand is still on Kara’s, that loose thread between her fingers. “Guess so,” she replies.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Expertise can't help you here.

[kensatou]

i'll let phie-san say it:

[mroddmod]

they are like puppies. 2 me

[inkskinned]

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

[jerich0two]

Surprise! It's not Hazbin Hotel, shock horror... but happy pride month! I like this Mordecai headcanon (edit: I've since been told that it's canon!)

[demaparbat-hp]

He truly did.

[egophiliac]

still ruminating over Lost In the Book With Spooky Skeletons Part 1, so here's a selection of some of my favorite little bits! (...some more loosely paraphrased than others) (I just feel like Idia has no room to criticize in general, okay)

anyway, I'm sure we're just going to have a fun time celebrating Halloween and nothing bad is going to happen whatsoever! :)

[bean-spring]

Hot take and not to be a killjoy or the shipping police but people treating Viktor or Jinx's aroace headcanons as if they were canon is not the revolutionary take people think it is.

Headcanons are always all right but we have to acknowledge that they are somehow damaging when they apply to stereotypes. It might not be the case for everyone but most of the time people unconsciously assume that disability/mental illness=asexuality. These headcanons erase the freedom of attraction from people who are already seen as unable to have sexual/romantic experiences/desires, when it's completely untrue and harmful.

You can headcanon Viktor and Jinx as aroace, but I have seen people changing their minds once Viktor is no longer disabled (s2 with all of his other forms) and Jinx is no longer as mentally ill (alternate universe Powder). And it speaks wonders of how people see these characters.

"I never thought about Jinx being able to feel romantic/sexual attraction until s2!" To believe she's actually only capable of that when she's not "damaged" is incredibly disturbing. Especially since Jinx has always had a bit of a flirty personality too.

"I've always seen Viktor as asexual, I don't know why!" That's fine. You can headcanon him as ace. But I believe there is a reason behind it, most of the time, if for some inexplicable reason the "vibes" of the disabled character are making you think he's ace.

I say all of this being aroaspec myself, by the way. Headcanon all you want but going to people's posts commenting how "it's weird for you that they have romantic/sexual plots when they're clearly aroace" is not a win at all. It's a headcanon, after all, and it should be treated as such, and that's fine. But it also is damaging to spread stereotypes like these.

Of course the disabled character is asexual. Of course the mentally ill character is aromantic. It's not as revolutionary as you might think, tbh.

Fandom is not activism and it's all right to have any headcanons you want BUT some of them are filled with damaging stuff and perhaps we should look into ourselves more before treating these assumptions as something canon.

[cosmonavo]

The biggest sin in that game is that I can't dating this freak skeleton man

[magnusbae]

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

A post in 2014:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

[time-to-write-and-suffer]

I love how on Tumblr, "media literacy" has become "Um, just because someone writes about this doesn't mean they're endorsing this. I hate all these media puritans ruining everything."

I'm sad to inform you that knowing when and whether an author is endorsing something, implying something, saying something, is also part of media literacy. Knowing when they are doing this and when they're not is part of media literacy. Assuming that no author has ever endorsed a bad thing is how you fall for proper gander. It's not media literacy to always assume that nobody ever has agreed with the morally reprehensible ideas in their work.

Sometimes, authors are endorsing something, and you need to be aware when that happens, and you also need to be aware when you're doing it as an author. All media isn't horny dubcon fanfic where you and the author know it's problematic IRL but you get off to it in the privacy of your brain. Sometimes very smart people can convince you of something that'll hurt others in the real world. Sometimes very dumb people will romanticize something without realizing they're doing it and you'll be caught up in it without realizing that you are.

Being aware of this is also media literacy. Being aware of the narrative tools used to affect your thinking is media literacy. Deciding on your own whether you agree with an author or not is media literacy. Enjoying characters doing bad things and allowing authors to create flawed or cruel characters for the sake of a story is perfectly fine, but it is not the same as being media literate. Being smug about how you never think an author has bad intentions tells me you're edgy, not that you're media literate. You can't use one rule to apply to all media. That's not how media literacy works. Sorry! Sorry! Sorry! Aheem heem. Anyway.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The math just adds up!

[garbean]

I love dunmeshi for the like.. built in horror of consumption. Like they eat to survive, they eat to honor their prey, they eat to possibly mourn someone. Laios eats monsters because he wants to learn more about the things he loves, Senshi eats monsters to feel included in the ecosystem because he didn't fit in with the outside and with most creatures in general, Chilchuck DOESN'T eat as much as he could because eating too much could kill all the party members, Marcille eats monsters and hates it but she still does it because she'll die before she could save Falin.

[akantorrr]

[missmisnomer]

it's always a good day to wake up and choose violence

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