#I don't think that's necessarily clear

[nameless-poet]

Hellfire

I am the last warden of Hell. Alone I stem back the tides. The souls driven by agony are driven away by the blaze.

They know it in their hearts. It was never about right. It was about my might. The whole time.

And yet they'll still die For my wars, in my fights.

[yukipri]

Another mini Din & Paz

Probably shortly after Din joined the covert.

~~

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[wakebymoonsleepbysun]

So following the "the TADC characters aren't humans trapped in a game, they're digitized copies of humans and the real humans are just going about their days" theory...

How fucked up would it be if said humans are actually WATCHING the TADC play out as if it's a game of Sims you just created all your friends in and set to autoplay? And with about as much empathy?

"LMAO dude our characters fucking hate each other now"

"Dude your character just went insane and burned down the whole tent haha"

"Oh my god your character abstracted ALREADY?? Lmao dude it's been like 10 minutes what happened??"

[clonerightsagenda]

I rag on Maes Hughes for being chill with genocide but to be *entirely* fair upon a reread, it's not like he's loving it, he's just not particularly haunted by it either. Roy rants about how this is a betrayal of how he joined the military to protect people (mistake number one, dude, seriously) and Maes calls him naive. His reason for fighting is to stay alive. While Roy talks about his dreams of a better future, Maes refers to letters from his girlfriend as his brighter future. He's willing to support Roy's ambitions because Roy's his friend, but he thinks they're childish.

The impression I get is that Hughes has decided he can tolerate atrocities as long as he stays alive and can go home to his loving family, so he leans into that loving family really hard. That's his reward. That's what makes it worth it. Which adds a layer to Envy killing him while disguised as his wife. You can't hold those things separate. If you're a collaborator propping up an awful regime, your family (and you) will still eventually become its victims. The rot at the heart of the nation is wearing your loved one's face.

[gay-otlc]

People on this webbed site have their brains explode when we try to talk about how trans men of any sexuality are oppressed, so I genuinely do not think your brains could handle it if I said the Scary Privileged Straight Men ™ are oppressed, but at some point we're gonna need to talk about how your "ewww straight man" jokes directed at trans men is genuinely just TERF rhetoric.

[aerithisms]

i think my problem with this dw season arc accusing the audience of fanbrain for theorising about ruby is that it both feels deceitful and isn't actually that compelling from a character perspective. the season goes out of its way to build up supernatural mystery around ruby and even invokes susan more heavily than ever before in a way that is deliberately trying to get the audience to make those connections. and then it turns around and says you stupid idiot why would you ever try to connect these dots i have deliberately tried to get you to connect.

building up a mystery only for the character to be ordinary is an impossible girl arc redux only this time accusing the viewer of failing to see the humanity of the companion, whereas the impossible girl arc was turning that accusation on the doctor. 7b didn't really blame the audience for viewing clara as a puzzle and in fact several times spells out the fact that clara is perfectly ordinary before the big reveal to give the audience a chance to catch on. as 7b goes on, instead of laying the mystery on thicker, the audience just gets more and more affirmations that clara is a normal human being (rings of akhaten, journey to the centre of the tardis, hide). i found this approach compelling because it was rooted in character, focusing on the doctor's disconnection from humanity/the gendered dynamic of a man treating a woman as his manic pixie mystery to pull him out of grief. s14's meta approach of accusing the viewer feels both unfair, given it has deliberately led the viewer towards theorising, and personally less compelling to me because it wasn't tied into character in any way.

the thing about rey's parentage in tlj is that the reason rian johnson chose to go for that reveal was that it was the only answer that was interesting. none of the theories - rey is a skywalker, rey is a kenobi, and even the eventually canonical rey is a palpatine - were interesting or satisfying because they brought nothing compelling to the table for the story being told. the only satisfaction to be gained from those answers was a fanbrained "omg rey is important because she's related to that guy from the other movie." on top of that, rey desperately wants her parents to have been important, to give her life and her abandonment some kind of significance. so them being ordinary provided the most compelling trajectory for her character because it was the thing she least wanted to hear. it forced her to do the most introspection and growth, as well as tying into the film's themes about the capacity of ordinary people to be special. it wasn't just a choice made to "gotcha" the viewer, it was rooted in character.

i don't think ruby's mother being ordinary accomplishes the same thing. by invoking susan, s14 is engaging with the most egregious example of the doctor's streak of abandonment, which has potential to be very compelling in relation to ruby (and now also the doctor's) own abandonment issues. theories that ruby might be susan, or be somehow related to susan, or somehow related to the doctor, weren't just fanbrained "omg she's related to that guy i know from the classic series." they were theories genuinely rooted in character and the potential to explore both the doctor and ruby's issues with abandonment. and this is something the show willingly led fans towards by invoking susan so much in the first place. so for the show to turn around and act like they were shallow out of nowhere ideas when they were not shallow and were based on potential character conflicts the show itself deliberately invoked, feels misguided.

as well as that, ruby's mother being ordinary does not require that same growth from ruby as it did for rey because it is exactly what ruby wanted to hear. she never wanted her mother to be important, she just wanted to know who her mother was and have a connection with her. so finding out she was a normal woman who still loves her and wants to be a part of her life is everything she's ever wanted. it doesn't introduce interesting conflict for her the way rey's parents being ordinary did for her, because they were written as different characters with different hangups over their abandonment.

tl;dr i don't necessarily dislike ruby's mother being ordinary as an idea but compared to the things it was inspired by - 7b and star wars - it is not nearly as compelling in terms of how it relates to the characters or themes. and the meta angle, while conceptually interesting, doesn't quite work for me because it feels a little manipulative of the audience.

[bobbinalong]

what earth names do you think otho and osul would pick if they had to pick some?

[mysecretdsmpblog]

quietly reading philza's arcs with rose and the ender king + Hardcore in general as a dissociative disorder instead of possession. phil having a hard time differentiating whether things were dreams or reality, his memory being dogshit throughout, finding things done he didn't do, reading books and letters written to him from someone else, the arguably dissociative episodes of Hardcore, the whole Birdhouse arc, now with him doing shit he otherwise wouldn't, having times where his skills/senses are different (e.g. experiencing temporary blindness and then having strength/resistance he wouldn't otherwise have).

[johnskleats]

Ty Lee and Katara would be friends

[butchhamlet]

that quote about shakespeare being “not of an age, but for all time” does, of course, oversimplify the way shakespeare’s plays were shaped by his time period, but sometimes i do think about how you can read the merchant of venice as making a statement that white people who are marginalized (see portia, white woman, and antonio and bassiano, white gay people) are still, first and foremost, white people who will enact social violence on jewish people & people of color in order to keep their own societal standings secure. which is fascinating from a standpoint of intersectionality & dissecting the violence in white womanhood, and is also fascinating because shakespeare wrote this play in 1596

[hammerhead-jpg]

Lazy ahh doodles of some of the other pjo characters cuz they need some love too

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

honestly it's been really healing being back to actively contributing things and writing out thoughts on tumblr the last week or so, because while twitter tends to be easier for me to write out Thoughts on without getting overwhelmed, the environment in the twitter fandom circles i'm interested in is not only infested with antis but cliqueish in a way that is caustic to the fucking soul if you try to express a thought that's more than three sentences long--a hundred times over if you're autistic in slightly the wrong way--and it's incredibly reassuring to come back to an environment where the very kindest and most inclusive people toward you are not clearly thinking the r-slur the entire time they interact with you lmao

[name-doggo]

One thing I really wish the FF Community would Stop doing is Removing All Nuance from the Parents in Those Stories in order to Make Them Abusive Supervillains who Never Loved their Kid.

Like... In the Four Years I've been here, and for how Small the Community really is, you'd be surprised how many Times I've seen it-

[osaumu]

LIGHT / DARK TRIAD TEST.

you lean 57% more toward the dark triad than the light triad.

you are 86.07% darker than the average person.

tagging: @tormenther, @doppogin, @rottedfigs, @ategod, @leventar \ @chuyua, @adamanteine + @memuntos (and anyone else who wants to do it) !

[guzhuangheaven]

Hello! Love your gif sets—have you thought about doing some for comparing Joy of Life Fan Xian from season 1 (esp. early on) and Fan Xian from season 2? He grows so much, and gets so much more ruthless in some ways, and sharper and more cunning, and I think you can see it also in his face and bearing in some scenes. Feels like it would be an interesting thing to compare and contrast!

This sounds like too much brain power involved 😂

I have thought about comparing the stabbing scene at the end of season 1 and the recreation at the beginning of season 2 just to show how much weight Zhang Ruoyun lost between the two seasons. It's not so obvious if you just watch season 2 on its own, but back to back with season 1...the contrast is quite stark.

[wonder-worker]

“…The Anglo-Saxon era is often thought of as having been a golden age for women. Since the late eighteenth century, it has been a commonplace that women in England had better rights before the Norman Conquest than they did afterwards, and were held in higher esteem by society. Before 1066, said one eminent historian in the mid-twentieth century, men and women enjoyed ‘a rough and ready partnership’. As so often with golden ages, however, this picture rests on a selective reading of very limited and debatable evidence. One of its principal props is an account of German women written by the Roman historian Tacitus towards the end of the first century AD. These women, claimed Tacitus, were virtuous, frugal and chaste, and supported their sons and husbands by encouraging them to acts of valour. But this was simply a Roman praising ‘barbarian’ society in order to criticize his own. German women were portrayed as laudable because, unlike their Roman counterparts, they did not conduct adulterous affairs or waste their time at baths and theatres. The reality, unfortunately, seems to be that the status of women in first-century Germany and Anglo-Saxon England was no better than it was in later centuries.”

-Marc Morris, "Anglo-Saxons: The History of the Beginnings of England, 400-1066” / Pauline Stafford, "Women and the Norman Conquest"

Anglo-Saxon England has thus been a Golden Age variously of women's domestication, women's legal emancipation, women's education and women's sexual liberation. The length of a tradition which has changed so fundamentally over time is no guarantee of its veracity. A cursory view of a range of evidence from either side of the 1066 divide casts immediate doubt on the idea of a brutal Norman ending of the Golden Age. The raw statistics of Domesday, for example, suggest a different picture of England on the eve of the Norman arrival. No more than five per cent of the total hidage of land recorded was in the hands of women in 1066. Of that five per cent, 80-85% was in the hands of only eight women, almost all of them members of the families of the great earls, particularly of earl Godwine, or of the royal family. By the tenth and eleventh centuries women other than the queen are virtually absent from the witness lists of the royal charters, and thus apparently from the political significance such witness lists record.”